The High Cost of Knowledge Recovery

Knowledge recovery is the process of culling meaningful propositions from documents and crafting them in the form of Novakian Concept Maps, thereby making the material more useful and usable. This report discusses our first major effort at knowledge recovery. Expert knowledge about terrain exists in the form of traditional documents discussing landforms, soils, rock types, etc. (Hoffman, 1983; Mintzer & Messmore, 1984). These were recast as Concept Maps in ROCK-TA ("Representation Of Conceptual Knowledge-Terrain Analysis"), which is a very large knowledge model, consisting of over 150 Concept Maps, containing over 3,000 propositions, and dozens of multimedia resources (text pieces, aerial photos, maps, etc.). The knowledge recovery effort was very costly in terms of time and effort, suggesting that knowledge-based organizations should attempt to make knowledge capture an on-going aspect of work, rather than finding themselves in the situation of needing to recapture knowledge. A second aspect of the work reported here involved the need to support navigation among the many Concept Maps in ROCK-TA.