Diagrammatic Knowledge Acquisition: Elicitation, Analysis and Issues

This paper considers the acquisition of knowledge that experts would naturally express in the form of diagrams — diagrammatic knowledge acquisition, DKA. The implications for DKA of previous research on diagrammatic representations and reasoning are considered. Examples of knowledge elicitation and knowledge analysis, with two different diagrammatic representations, are given. They demonstrate the feasibility of DKA. Issues raised by the analysis of the examples are discussed and consideration is given to the development of DKA tools and methodologies. DKA is distinguished from knowledge visualization, which attempts to design effective visual presentations of given information that is already expressed as propositions.