Shaping a CBR View with XML

Conor Hayes, Padraig Cunningham

Department of Computer Science
Trinity College Dublin
Conor.Hayes@cs.tcd.ie



Abstract. Case Based Reasoning has found increasing application on the
Internet as an assistant in Internet commerce stores and as a reasoning agent for
online technical support. The strength of CBR in this area stems from its reuse
of the knowledge base associated with a particular application, thus providing
an ideal way to make personalised configuration or technical information
available to the Internet user. Since case data may be one aspect of a companys
entire corporate knowledge system, it is important to integrate case data easily
within a companys IT infrastructure, using industry specific vocabulary. We
suggest XML as the likely candidate to provide such integration. Some
applications have already begun to use XML as a case representation language.
We review these and present the idea of a standard case view in XML that can
work with the vocabularies or namespaces being developed by specific
industries. Earlier research has produced version 1.0 of a Case Based Mark-up
Language which attempts to mark-up cases in XML to enable distributed
computing. The drawbacks of this implementation are outlined in this paper as
well as the developments in XML that allow us to produce an XML View of
a companys knowledge system. We will detail the benefits of our system for
industry in general in terms of extensibility, ease of reuse and interoperability.
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