Case Representation, Acquisition, and Retrieval in SIROCCO

As part of our investigation of how abstract principles are operationalized to facilitate their application to specific fact situations, we have begun to develop and experiment with SIROCCO (System for Intelligent Retrieval of Operationalized Cases and COdes), a CBR retrieval and analysis system applied to the domain of engineering ethics. SIROCCO is intended to retrieve decided engineering ethics cases and previously applied ethics codes to assist engineers and students in analyzing new cases. Here we describe a limited but expressive language designed to represent a wide range of ethics cases in SIROCCO, a world-wide web tool developed to perform case acquisition and support a measure of consistency in representation, and an experiment to validate the initial phase of SIROCCO’s retrieval algorithm and test its sensitivity to small variations in case description.