Induction and Reasoning from Cases (1993-1996)

The ESPRIT project INRECA offers tools and methods for developing, validating, and maintaining decision support systems. Inreca's basic technologies are inductive and case-based reasoning. Induction extracts decision knowledge from case databases. It brings to light patterns among cases and helps monitoring trends over time. Case-based reasoning relates the engineer's current problem to past experiences. Inreca fully integrates both techniques within one environment and uses the respective advantages of both technologies. Inreca offers hypermedia interfaces and graphic browsers. Its object-oriented representation language CASUEL allows the definition of complex case structures and relations. The descriptive model editor is used to interactively define classes, objects, attributes, and relations. The case manager uses this information to build automatically a questionnaire for collecting cases. The questionnaire can be customized and hypermedia entities - such as sound, drawings, pictures, and videos - may be integrated.