In search of a common structure underlying a representative set of generic tasks and methods: The hierarchical classification and therapy planning cases study

Abstract

CommonKADS methodology for the analysis of human expertise and the development of knowledge based systems yields as a result a library of generic tasks and problem solving methods (PSM's), to be used as components of a conceptual model; later on the corresponding formal and design models have to be made. Currently, given the conceptual model, a complete description that explains how we can obtain the program code is not available yet, though important efforts have been made in order to describe such transitions. Besides, an immediate question is how much these descriptions depend on the generic task.

Our conjeture in this article is that in addition to the libraries of generic tasks and PSM's, there is an underlying structure indeed, a common structure for most of these tasks, at least for the diagnosis and planning tasks. In these cases, we can describe a constructive method for obtaining the operational code for the task and the associated PSM. That is, if we describe the generic task in a suitable way, in terms of natural language, we can establish relationships between this description and some structure we can represent by means of hierarchic graphs. Since we can also establish relationships between the program code and such graphs and both relationships are constant and reversible, we can always use this method to obtain the program code, given the generic task and inversely, to obtain the graph and the model at the knowledge level from the code.