Abstract
Task Analysis by Problem Solving (TAPS) focuses on uncovering domain-specific procedural and declarative knowledge that learners and intelligent systems need to solve problems and carry out tasks. In TAPS, a subject matter expert (SME) solves problems while a knowledge extraction expert (KEE) takes detailed notes on the procedures and justifications, and later solves problems using those notes. TAPS is an iterative approach that distills expert knowledge to a level that includes the kind of details that SMEs often fail to convey when describing what they do. TAPS has proven to be particularly useful in uncovering a task’s or domain’s information requirements and can aid researchers’ efforts to model human cognition on complex tasks, build AI systems on those tasks, and devise instructional materials for human learners.