Discovery of CPA`s Tacit Decision Knowledge Using Fuzzy Modeling

The discovery of tacit knowledge from domain experts is one of the most exciting challenges in today\`s knowledge management. The nature of decision knowledge in determining the quality a firm\`s short-term liquidity is full of abstraction, ambiguity, and incompleteness, and presents a typical tacit knowledge extraction problem. In dealing with knowledge discovery of this nature, we propose a scheme that integrates both knowledge elicitation and knowledge discovery in the knowledge engineering processes. The knowledge elicitation component applies the Verbal Protocol Analysis to establish industrial cases as the basic knowledge data set. The knowledge discovery component then applies fuzzy clustering to the data set to build a fuzzy knowledge based system, which consists of a set of fuzzy rules representing the decision knowledge, and membership functions of each decision factor for verifying linguistic expression in the rules. The experimental results confirm that the proposed scheme can effectively discover the expert\`s tacit knowledge, and works as a feedback mechanism for human experts to fine-tune the conversion processes of converting tacit knowledge into implicit knowledge.