Using cases, evidences and context to support decision making

Abstract

Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) represents a decision-making process centered on justifications of relevant information contained scientific research proof found in the Internet. Context is a type of knowledge that supports identifying what is or is not relevant in a given situation. Therefore, the integration of evidence and context is still an open issue. Besides, EBP procedures do not provide mechanisms to retain strategic knowledge from individual solutions, which could facilitate the learning of decision makers, preserving evidences used. On the other hand, Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) uses the history of similar cases and provides mechanisms to retain problem-solving. This paper proposes the integration of the CBR model with EBP procedures and Context to support decision making. Our approach includes a conceptual framework extended to support the development of applications that combines cases, evidence and context, preserving the characteristics of usability and portability across domains. An implementation in the area of crime prevention illustrates the usage of our proposal. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.