Development of a case-based decision-aiding tool

The research reported forms part of the work undertaken by the project DISCOURSE. The project aims to improve both the efficiency with which industrial courseware is developed and the effectiveness of the courseware that is produced. It proposes to achieve this by allowing authors to take advantage of research developments in knowledge-based systems, software engineering, multimedia technology, object oriented database technology, and psychology. The particular problem addressed by this research concerns the use of an instructional design tool called the Generic Tutoring Environment (GTE). This tool is used to produce knowledge-based instructional designs. The nub of the problem relates to supporting the use of GTE by instructional designers who are not familiar with knowledge-based techniques, and who have tight budgets to work to. It was decided that an alternative approach to full case-based reasoning would be used, i.e., case-based decision-aiding, where a case library is used to support the decision maker but control is left with the human agent-rather than the computer. (J. Kolodner, 1991)