3. Representing Experience

Experience management requires representing experience in appropriate data structures. Experience representation must enable efficient experience retrieval and adaptation. On the other hand, the effort required for experience base development and maintenance must be taken into account.As shown in the previous chapter, all knowledge related to experience reuse can be subdivided into the three knowledge containers: vocabulary, experience base, and reuse-related knowledge. Since the discussion of the experience representation cannot be separated from the vocabulary, this chapter will address these two issues together. Each of the two following chapters will cover the representation of reuse related knowledge. Chapter 4 deals with the knowledge required for retrieval while Chapt. 5 deals with representing knowledge required for experience adaptation. The representation approaches discussed are primarily based on methods from case-based reasoning and more generally from knowledge-based systems research.