Case Based Reasoning Tools
- Software tools for CBR are many and varied.computer image by Orlando Florin Rosu from Fotolia.com
Case Based Reasoning (CBR) is a problem-solving technique using the idea of reviewing previous similar cases and adapting those solutions to face new problems. It is based on a purposed model of thinking in which the human mind stores events as mental scripts and then uses them to deal with similar future situations. While philosophic in origin, CBR was later used to create knowledge-based computer reasoning systems for Artificial Intelligence research. Since then, several CBR software tools have been created for commercial uses, such as software help desks. - Produced by Inference Corporation, CBR-Express was specifically designed for those sorts of help desks. It allows end users to create and maintain case bases of business experiences. It allows you to build directly from actual events or cases, instead of applying engineered rules. It includes Inference System Builder for database accessing and a designer for creating interactive user interfaces. It has the ability to handle free-form text responses, which allows it to work despite spelling errors or typos in the entered text. CBS-Express has also been used for intelligent task assistance, information access systems and knowledge publishing.
- Created by Brightware, this CBR system comes with a GUI builder, allows links to databases in most DBMS formats and offers cross-platform support for most operating systems and hardware platforms. Because it's made by the same company as CBR-Express, and in fact some of its code was used to create CBR-Express, it also features free-form text matching. However, its functions are more convenient and allow you to integrate other techniques.
- Made by Haley Enterprises, Eclipse is available for Windows and UNIX platforms and some mainframes. The Easy Reasoner has nearest neighboring matching and inductive retrieval of database records. Like Art, it ignores "noise words" (such as "and," "I" and "there") and it too can deal with spelling errors. Eclipse's development tools are not as easy as Art*Enterprise, and it cannot integrate data from disparate databases. It is quite fast, though.
- Produced by Cognitive Systems, ReMind was originally developed for the Mac and later ported to Windows and many UNIX platforms. It's meant as library to be embedded within other applications and includes a rich interactive development environment. It requires more work by the user, but it sports a highly varied array of matching, indexing and induction tools.
- Made by Esteem Software, Esteem features not only case retrieval but also rule-based case adaptation. It has the unique ability to nest cases, allowing it to retrieve cases in other case bases. It provides hierarchical retrieval, which lets the user control the induction process through feature counting, weighted feature computation and inferred computation.
