25 Years of Knowledge Acquisition

This special issue celebrates 25 years of Knowledge Acquisition and centers around a breathtaking essay by Brian Gaines, the founder and former Editor-in-Chief of our journal, who discusses the processes of knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation and knowledge sharing across the millennia, and emphasizes the essential role that these processes have played throughout history, as engines of human evolution. In addition to Gaines' paper, this issue also comprises ten short contributions from a number of other prominent Knowledge Acquisition researchers. These provide a broad range of perspectives on the field and reflect the vivacity and diversity of the research in this area. While the Knowledge Acquisition area is by and large healthy and thriving, the shift in the past decade from intelligent problem solving to data acquisition and management can be seen as somewhat ‘reductionist’ with respect to the original ambitions of the community. This special issue provides a timely reminder of the ambitious goals of the field, its interdisciplinary ethos, and the sheer fun that the community has had in the past 25 years in pursuing the objective of building intelligent and symbiotic systems. I trust that our readers will be inspired and excited by this set of brilliant essays.