A Design Science Research Methodology for Expert Systems Development

Abstract

The knowledge of design science research (DSR) can have applications for improving expert systems (ES) development research. Although significant progress of utilising DSR has been observed in particular information systems design – such as decision support systems (DSS) studies – only rare attempts can be found in the ES design literature. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate the use of DSR for ES design. First, we explore the ES development literature to reveal the presence of DSR as a research methodology. For this, we select relevant literature criteria and apply a qualitative content analysis in order to generate themes inductively to match the DSR components. Second, utilising the findings of the comparison, we determine a new DSR approach for designing a specific ES that is guided by another result – the findings of a content analysis of examination scripts in Mathematics. The specific ES artefact for a case demonstration is designed for addressing the requirement of a ‘wicked’ problem in that the key purpose is to assist human assessors when evaluating multi-step question (MSQ) solutions. It is anticipated that the proposed design knowledge, in terms of both problem class and functions of ES artefacts, will help ES designers and researchers to address similar issues for designing information system solutions.