Abstract:

A method and interface to elicit knowledge of a person’s experience is considered. The method is based on Active Knowledge (AK), a format of knowledge that prompts its active reuse and creation of new knowledge, and its application to experiences. In this method, an experience is defined by an action, resulting feeling, and related conditions and values that led to that feeling. Each of these elements is expressed by multi-view symbols based on a predefined classification. These symbols are composed to express one’s experience. In particular, this paper focuses on visits to places. This method supports and encourages users to remember, analyze, and understand one’s own experience in a standard expression. Users are able to compare own experience with others and to learn from them or even reuse it for one’s future activity.
To share experiences from everyday activities, people use Social Networking Services, web blogs, etc. Such data is used by both people and computers as resources for future activities. However, the form and content of such data vary among individuals and depend on many elements such as situation, topic, etc. In a sense, they do not necessarily include completely one’s thoughts, feelings, and reasons behind them. The quality of descriptions also depends greatly on one’s command of language and skills of observation, analysis, and logical structuring. Our method and interface are designed with the intention to collect as much knowledge from the user for use as computational data as well as to support people’s self-analysis and to express their ideas and thoughts in a common format.

The method and interface are applicable to a wide range of domains including knowledge elicitation, affective computing, and also education where it could be used as a form of an experience map for enhanced learning effect.
To demonstrate our approach, a software application to record experiences of one’s visit to places has been developed. The application functions as a trip advisor based on acquired experience data and can compute a recommended sequence of places to visit with emotions taken into consideration.

In this paper, the developed classification and symbols as well as interfaces to express and browse experiences is presented. Also the trip advisor application and results of a preliminary evaluation of the approach are explained.

Keywords:

Active Knowledge, experience, enhanced learning