Expert Systems: Aspects of and Limitations to the Codifiability of Knowledge

This paper discusses recent attempts to codify knowledge through the development of expert systems in several different contexts. This paper argues that in the context of expert systems there is some knowledge that can be codified (turned into an expert system essentially in its entirety), some for which this is partly possible, and some for which it is basically impossible given the state of today''s technology. We look specifically at the expertise of three different types of workers: the artisan, the repairer and the strategist, and differences in natures of their expertise, and ask what it is about these different tasks that makes human expertise easy, hard or impossible to capture in codified form. The studies also show though that different types of knowledge lend themselves with different degrees of compliance to the codification process.