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Corporate Memories as Distributed Case Bases

In its most general form, a case base is a source of complex data stored in specific formats. A number of knowledge and data sources that comprise a corporate memory could be defined as case bases in this sense. Case bases could arise from formated records of useful employee experience and/or expertise. Alternately, Case-Knowledge Engineers or content experts could design case bases of relevant experience by populating them with collections of records in appropriate formats. Certain unstructured databases like text databases can also be converted to case bases by generating semantic descriptors characterizing each of its documents. Much of the work in information extraction and text summarization concentrates on generating such descriptors[Lehnert et al.1992]. Given such descriptor generating capabilities, any set of databases with inter-related data can be treated as distributed case bases. Another promising alternative involves creation of metadata[Weibel1995] that is an informative record attached to a document (structured or unstructured). A typical metadata record could contain elements like subject, author, title, object type, relationship to other elements, coverage etc[Weibel1995]. Development of metadata becomes especially feasible if the authors of a resource or a document could be encouraged to create such a description. Perhaps some of the most important sources of distributed case bases available to a corporation beyond its organizational boundaries are the distributed digital libraries with mutually related information, like PARTNET[Partnet] on the Internet. PARTNET is WWW-accessible distributed electro-mechanical component library developed by the University of Utah's Mechanical Engineering Department as a resource to connect designers and engineers with parts suppliers. In this paper, we view a case base as not just a passive data store but an active one that can reason about its contents and their appropriateness in the context of a query. Thus, when we use the term ``agent'' and a case base interchangingly, we mean that the agent is an active case-based reasoning entity that can reason about its local case knowledge.



Next: Negotiated Retrieval Up: Retrieval and Reasoning Previous: Retrieval and Reasoning


nagendra@cs.umass.edu
Mon Sep 16 17:23:45 EDT 1996