6.3 Suspended Ceiling Design Process - Bilkent University

observed in the case studies include data collection, data
representation, and enabling the widespread use of the tool.
8.2.2.1 Data Collection
The difficulties encountered during data collection were discussed in
Chapters 6 and 7. The amount of information involved and sometimes
the poor understanding of the process of the participants may make the
data collection process very time consuming. In fact, in knowledge-
intensive applications like DSM, the problem of knowledge elicitation is
often addressed (Taşlı and Özgüç, 2001). Sources of knowledge
include human experts, textbooks, work files and previous cases, but
there is no single elicitation technique that may be uniformly applied.
This problem is known as the “knowledge elicitation bottleneck”
(Schreiber, 1993). Elicitation from human experts is especially difficult.
Individual experience may be incomplete, irrelevant, or even incorrect.
Moreover, as the expert’s proficiency increases, the knowledge
becomes more instinctive and thus harder to elicit.
In order to ease the data collection process for DSM development
Sabbaghian and Eppinger (1998) developed a web-based tool for
collecting data over the Internet. Danilovic and Börjesson (2001) point
out that in almost all of the DSM studies data has been gathered by a
single researcher. They discuss that in these studies, individual
cognitive limitations prevent the system being captured, since
individuals are able to grasp only limited parts of the system analyzed.
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