Knowledge acquisition: Past, present and future

As we celebrate the 50th knowledge acquisition conference this year it is appropriate to review progress in knowledge acquisition techniques not only over the quarter century since the conference series began but backwards through the millennia to the beginnings of knowledge capture and forwards through the foreseeable future to speculate on reasonable expectations, appropriate targets and potential surprises in the next quarter century. ''Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past. What might have been is an abstraction remaining a perpetual possibility only in world of speculation.'' (T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets).