Reducing the Case Acquisition and Maintenance Bottleneck with User-Feedback-Driven Case Base Maintenance

Current case acquisition and case base maintenance techniques implement quality assurance for cases through reviews or by analyzing case properties before making a case available for retrieval. Since reviews of cases with much textual data, in particular, cannot be fully automated, this is done by a maintenance team. With limited resources, this maintenance team becomes a bottleneck. To reduce this bottleneck, our idea is to move parts of the case acquisition and maintenance tasks to the user. With this, the maintenance team needs to do case maintenance only for cases with an ‘out of range’ quality. Obviously, this idea requires changes to the CBR process and system design. This is described by our experience feedback loop design concept, which is presented in this paper. This design concept contains a userfeedback-driven case base maintenance technique as its core element. This design concept has been validated positively in real-world projects for intra-organizational CBR systems with tight integration into business processes and into the respective tools.