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 provided an early operational demonstration 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 spans three decades of publications and conference work, from 1997 to 2019.
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 provides a way to examine which knowledge types are showing up in a 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 without requiring me to lead every session. That practical change makes broader use possible.