Distributing case-base maintenance: The collaborative maintenance approach

Case-base maintenance is an important emerging issue for case-base reasoners as they scale up to handle real-world problems in unstable environments. Over time, the contents of a case base may become out of date or inconsistent with the target problem space, and maintenance strategies must be devised to help recognize and repair these problems by deleting, adding, or modifying cases, for example. In this article we describe a maintenance framework called collaborative maintenance (CM), which has been designed to facilitate, monitor, and control the incremental update of live, dynamic case bases. Our approach is novel in that it automatically supports a distributed, interactive maintenance process-users are permitted to recommend case updates, and the collaborative maintenance process ensures that these recommendations are properly reviewed and actioned.