Use of case-based reasoning in the domain of building regulations

Abstract

In traditional legal decision support systems, it has been regarded as natural to represent statutes in terms of decision rules and to link these to a separate case-based reasoning system for handling precedent. Statutory legal rules used in these systems are formal and prescriptive. Building regulations in Scotland are part of statute law and constitute part of a legal system together with case histories. In recent years, the regulations have been becoming less prescriptive and more emphasis has been put onto the interpretive use of the regulations. In developing a system which can assist domain experts in interpreting the regulations, this trend has presented us with difficulties in employing this traditional approach and has led us to a unified case-based model of the regulations and case histories. In this paper, we first describe the characteristics of the regulations and the activities involved in this domain. Second, we explain the reason why we abandoned the traditional approach. Third, we describe the system which has been developed using this case-based model.