Context-Based Development of Experience Bases

The experience of experts relies on the process of decision-making jointly with the progressive elaboration of a context-specific model. However, context modeling generally stays implicit because only the result of the decisionmaking process matters. Modeling context within a decision-making process supposes a uniform representation of knowledge, reasoning and contexts. In the Contextual-Graphs formalism, a decision-making episode is represented as a contextual graph where each path represents a practice developed by actors for making this decision in a specific working context. By incremental accumulation of the practices developed by experts, a contextual graph becomes an experience base with the decision-making process. Such an experience base may be used by humans for training future experts how to behave in the different ways to make a decision according to the variants of the working context. An intelligent assistant system exploiting such an experience base will be able to propose a more effective support to users than previous knowledge-based systems. This work is realized in the framework of a project in medicine for supporting experts in breast cancer diagnosis.