Dependency modeling for knowledge maintenance in distributed CBR systems

Abstract

Knowledge-intensive software systems have to be continuously maintained to avoid inconsistent or false knowledge and preserve the problem solving competence, efficiency, and effectiveness. The more knowledge a system contains, the more dependencies between the different knowledge items may exist. Especially for an overall system, where several CBR systems are used as knowledge sources, several dependencies exist between the knowledge containers of the CBR systems. The dependencies have to be considered when maintaining the CBR systems to avoid inconsistencies between the knowledge containers. This paper gives an overview and formal definition of these maintenance dependencies. In addition, a first version of an algorithm to identify these dependencies automatically is presented. Furthermore, we describe the current implementation of dependency modeling in the open source tool myCBR.