Bayesia Expert Knowledge Elicitation Environment (BEKEE)

Bayesia Expert Knowledge Elicitation Environment, or BEKEE for short, is a web application that is designed to minimize detrimental group biases in brainstorming sessions for knowledge elicitation from domain experts. The central idea is not to coerce consensus, but rather to elicit everyone’s individual views regarding the domain under study. To ensure the independent elicitation of probabilities, BEKEE queries experts individually via web-based interactive or batch questionnaires, which is are linked to the BayesiaLab application of the session facilitator.

Retrieving expert views in such a fashion generates many “parallel universes” in terms of domain understanding. These different perspectives can be formally compared by the facilitator and potentially returned to the group for a formal debate in the case of seriously conflicting assessments. In most cases, this is an iterative process and, even if stakeholder opinions do not converge, BayesiaLab will compile all views and produce a unifying Bayesian network. This graph is now a probabilistic summary of all the available expert opinions. As such, it can be utilized as a formal representation of the underlying domain. Most importantly, this graph is not merely a visual representation. Rather, a Bayesian network is a fully computable model of the domain, which immediately facilitates the simulation of what-if scenarios.

• BEKEE is a web application hosted by Bayesia's secure servers in France.
• The subscription allows utilizing the BEKEE server for an unlimited number of elicitation sessions during the subscription period.
• To create a BEKEE session and to retrieve results from a session, the host or the facilitator of the session must run BayesiaLab locally on his computer. The BEKEE subscription does not include a BayesiaLab license.
• The participants in a BEKEE session, i.e. they do not require BayesiaLab. They can participate in a BEKEE using any web browser.

 For more information, please see the BEKEE page.