Towards a case-based reasoning approach to analyze road accidents

A b s t r a c t . In this paper the prototype of a system designed to analyze road accidents is presented. The analysis is carried out in order to recognize within accident reports general mechanisms of road accidents that represent prototypes of road accidents. Case Based Reasoning (CBR) is the chosen problem solving paradigm. Natural language documents and semi-structured documents are used to build the cases of our system, which creates a difficulty. To cope with this difficulty we propose approaches integrating semantic resources. Hence, an ontologj' of accidentology and a terminology of road accidents are used to build cases. The ahgnment of two resources supports the retrieval process. A data processing model, based on models of accidentology, is proposed to represent the cases of the system. This paper presents the architecture of ACCTOS (Accident TO Scenarios), a case based reasoning system prototype. The model to represent the cases is introduced and the phases of the case based reasoning cycle are detailed.