A Delphi-based approach to developing expert systems with the cooperation of multiple experts

Knowledge acquisition has been a critical bottleneck in building knowledge-based systems. In past decades, several methods and systems have been proposed to cope with this problem. Most of these methods and systems were proposed to deal with the acquisition of domain knowledge from single expert. However, as multiple experts may have different experiences and knowledge on the same application domain, it is necessary to elicit and integrate knowledge from multiple experts in building an effective expert system. Moreover, the recent literature has depicted that ‘‘time’’ is an important parameter that might significantly affect the accuracy of inference results of an expert system; therefore, while discussing the elicitation of domain expertise from multiple experts, it becomes an challenging and important issue to take the ‘‘time’’ factor into consideration. To cope with these problems, in this study, we propose a Delphi-based approach to eliciting knowledge from multiple experts. An application on the diagnosis of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome has depicted the superiority of the novel approach. 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.