How to build a knowledge space by querying an expert
Mathieu Koppen, J Doignon · Journal of Mathematical Psychology · 1990
A particular field of knowledge is conceptualized as a set of problems (or questions). A person's knowledge state in this domain is formalized as the subset of problems this person is capable of solving. When the family of all knowledge states is closed under union, it is called a knowledge space. Doignon and Falmagne (1985) established a 1-1 correspondence between knowledge spaces and a class of surmise systems, a slight variant of AND/OR graphs. Here we rather obtain a 1-1 correspondence with a well defined class of quasi orders on the collection of all subsets of problems. The resulting approach to knowledge spaces helps to build such spaces for particular domains. We describe a procedure which relies on the answers of an expert to a carefully chosen sequence of information requests.