Problems in indexing problem solving methods
Joost Breuker · 1997
Organizing PSM into a library for reuse reveals two related problems that have thus far received little explicit attention: _What is the scope of reuse of a PSM? How distinctive/similar are PSM? In considering the first question, the working hypothesis in constructing such libraries, and in particular the CommonKADS library, has been that PSM are task specific, and that therefore the major indexing is by task types, and in particular by some taxonomy of tasks; secondary indexing is by other assumptions that are inherent to the PSM, in particular related to domain knowledge features. In [Breuker, 1994b] it was argued that such taxonomy is impossible to construct and that a suite of dependent generic types of problems is a better representation to characterize what a PSM should yield. In this paper some revisions of this suite are proposed. Although this enables a clearer functional indexing of PSM (i.e. by their competence), it is of only tertiary importance where it concerns the indexing of the real, operational PSM that heuristically exploit experience based domain knowledge. The primary indexing proposed here is by classifying the PSM by the way they generate solutions: by classification or by construction, confirming views held by [Clancey, 1985; deVelde, 1988; Puppe, 1993]