Introducing inductive methods in knowledge acquisition bydivide - and - conquerMaarten

In this paper we present the outline of a method that combines a divide-and-conquer approach, that is common in knowledge acquisition and software engineering , with the use of inductive techniques. The idea is to guide decomposition of a knowledge acquisition problem into subpr oblems by the expected costs and beneets of applying elicitation or induction t o acquire the knowledge for part of the target knowledge. The method is illustra ted with a \rational reconstruction" of a knowledge acquisition process that involved induc-tive techniques.