Towards a Knowledge-Level Model of Context and Context Use in Diagnostic Problems

Diagnostic support systems that help solving problems in open and weak theory domains need to be context-sensitive in order to reveal flexible and efficient behaviour. This paper presents a task-oriented methodology for analysing and modeling contextual knowledge at the knowledge level. We present a context-sensitive diagnosis approach (ConSID) which clarifies the connection between content and process knowledge. The former embodies the domain model, while the latter embodies the task and method models. We present a prototypical system, the ConSID-Creek, that applies the ConSID approach to the medical diagnostic domain. We illustrate how the system integrates case-based and explanation-based reasoning paradigms when realizing the abductive subtask of the overall diagnostic task.