Abstract: The key problem expert system facing is still the “bottle neck” problem of acquiring knowledge. Regarding the characteristics of ground meteorological instrument malfunction diagnosis, this paper introduces a method of automatic formula extraction which is based on diagnosis examples, analyses the examples mentioned above, and extracts the useful diagnosis knowledge. The introduction of this kind of knowledge acquisition method, it will effectively solve the problem on expanding available diagnosis facility of the expert system of universal ground meteorological instrument malfunction diagnosis, and greatly accelerate the expert system’s speed of acquiring knowledge.

Key words: expert system, knowledge acquisition, meteorological instrument