Knowledge Harvesting did not begin as a product. It began with a problem I couldn't stop seeing: people with deep, valuable knowledge are rarely invited to share it — and when they are, the knowing has become automatic, and automatic knowledge is hard to say.
The work begins in a master's thesis called EOR: Establish, Organize, Represent — The Foundation for Occupational Applications. Its dialogue subsystem, Tutor, was a structured-questioning engine: the direct ancestor of everything that followed.
The thesis became commercial software. LearnerFirst pioneered "learning-while-doing" applications and delivered them to over 4,000 organizations: Benchmarking, Process Management, Implementing ISO 9000, Work Profiling, and more. This was the first operational proof that structured questions could carry expert knowledge to people who needed it.
From the mid-90s on, the method ran as Knowledge Harvesting®: thousands of elicitation sessions with top performers across industries: troubleshooting nuclear reactors, designing chemical plants, coordinating pandemic operations, writing patent claims, steering drill strings, capturing what a nurse's diagnostic instinct actually does. Clients ranged from Intel, Chevron, and Dow to Abbott, GE, and the Florida Department of Education. The paper trail, three decades of publications and conference work, 1997 to 2019, is older, wider, and deeper than most of the field it belongs to.
Human-to-human elicitation worked. But it was labor-intensive: one practitioner (often, a team), one expert, discussions. The method's ceiling was my calendar. What was missing was an instrumented way to run the questioning, something that could interview, structure, inspect, and organize expertise without the human practitioner.
That is what the instruments are. 8 makes the eight kinds of knowledge visible in any conversation and runs the work loop, live and shipped today. 96 is the same engine at professional resolution, in active build. The capture surface became repeatable. The method that took thirty-seven years to develop now runs without me in the room, which is the definition of scale.