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From: byland@iris.cis.ohio-state.edu (Tom Bylander)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Data Interpretation - Diagnosis expert Task
Message-ID: <85816@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 9 Nov 90 14:56:47 GMT
References: <1990Nov6.184658.29097@asterix.drev.dnd.ca>
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Reply-To: Tom Bylander <byland@cis.ohio-state.edu>
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In article <1990Nov6.184658.29097@asterix.drev.dnd.ca> jberger@asterix.drev.dnd.ca (Jean Berger) writes:
>
>	Would someone help me in clarifying in an unambiguous manner
>	the real difference between two kind of expert tasks namely:
>
>	- Data Interpretation and
>	- Diagnosis

I would say that diagnosis is a subclass of data interpretation, i.e.,
a fault hypothesis is an interpretation of the observations.
Diagnostic reasoning, however, is often associated with data gathering
and test generation, both of which are probably considered separate
from data interpretation.

Data interpretation is also closely related to abduction, which is
finding explanations for data.  Perhaps it would be best to consider
explanations as a subclass of interpretations, making abduction a
subclass of data interpretation.

So I would roughly put the relationship this way.  Abduction is data
interpretation in which the interpretation is an explanation of the
data.  Diagnosis is abduction where the data are abnormal observations
and the explanation is a (composite) fault hypothesis.
							
Tom Bylander
byland@cis.ohio-state.edu