A Temporal Case-Based Reasoning Platform Relying on a Fuzzy Vector Spaces Object-Oriented Model and a Method to Design Knowledge Bases and Decision Support Systems in Multiple Domains

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper concerns time case-based reasoning, a temporal extension of case-based reasoning. As an alternative to the standard rule based systems that rely on fuzzification/defuzzification and induction on  a set of selected attributes, the authors build upon the previous research in reference [1]. They mention this issue several times (perhaps too many times: lines 4, 25, 28, 87, 97, 423, 487, 545). In fact, [1] was already an extension of an ESM’2019 conference paper. Although the only author of [1] is the first author of this submission, at times the authors mention “our previous paper” (lines 87 and 423). The team also produced related work in [22] and [23].

Anyway, the authors further investigate the fuzzy vector space object oriented model and method or FVSOOMM whose introduction was motivated by the need of modeling the personality, cognitive dissonance and emotions in marketing. Materials and Methods summarizes the methodology and describes the platform that implements it. Fields of application are given in the Results section. The Discussion includes future work.

My comments are as follows.

1. The Abstract is not very engaging. Also, it mentions “The platform” in line 9. Which platform? It has not been announced before.

2. The Conclusions are rather disappointing too.

3. The English writing is quite acceptable although I found a short list of errors:

3.1 Abstract. Line 6, defuzzification. Line 13: extra blank space before colon.

3.2 Line 38-39: the sentence lacks an object (what did Zadeh mention?), there is a typo in “mentionned”, and the next sentence should start with a capitalized word “We”.

3.3 The previously mentioned sentence is repeated almost word by word in lines 87-89.

3.4. Line 56: capitalize Results. Title of sections 2.1, 2.5: typos in Litterature and asses (sic). The first sentence of section 2.3, and first sentence of page 4, need improvement.

3.5 There is an extra T right above Figure 2. In the legend of this figure, “sigmoid” is the right word.

3.6 The paragraph at the end of page 4 is rather messy.

3.7 In page 5, improve the sentence “Let be an object for each …” and “Let be the object …” at lines 99, 100.

3.8 Improve the sentence in lines 121-123 (notice in particular, the repeated “the”).

3.9 In the legend of figure 4, maybe “that describes the … ” is better?

3.10 Line 513: plateform has a typo.

3.11 The sentence in line 546 lacks a final part (on what?) and then it end with hyphen (-) instead of period (.) All this first paragraph is rather messy.

3.12 Typo in ref. [2] cconnaissances.

4. Authors should refer to equations using parentheses

Author Response

We thank the reviewers for their helpful and constructive feedback. The following are some general comments that address many of the reviewer’s critiques:

• We have taken the views of the reviewers very seriously and have thoroughly modified and rewritten the paper to simplify and clarify the content. The paper has undergone an extensive proof-check and re-write by an English native speaker, correcting the grammar and typos to make it more understandable to readers. We have also caried out some restructuring to correct the flow of ideas and enhance the paper’s readability.

 

• We have changed the title

 

• We have included more references to relevant research (38 -> 78).

 

• We have re-written the Abstract to clarify the presented work.

 

• We have re-written the Introduction section to introduce the structure of the paper.

 

• We have re-written the Discussion and Conclusions sections to reflect the contributions of the paper, the limitations of the present FVSOOMM’s implementation, and future work.

 

• We have expanded sections that indicate rationale for the proposed FVSOOMM model and method.

 

• We have modified captions of figures and tables to clarify and make them more meaningful.

 

• We have expanded sections to fully explain concepts and explain the model, methods and steps, and the platform of FVCOOMM, both theoretically and with their use in the two examples of FVSOOMM’s application implementations.
• We will provide a separate file containing the pdf images of Figures and Tables used in the paper, so that they may be configured or resized according to the editor’s discretion.

Reviewer 1

• The Abstract is not very engaging. Also, it mentions “The platform” in line 9. Which platform? It has not been announced before.

Response: The abstract has been re-written to clarify the content. It also now indicates the content coverage more clearly and so strengthens the paper’s contribution to computer science.

• The Conclusions are rather disappointing.

Response: We have re-written the Discussion and Conclusions sections to reflect the contributions of the paper, the limitations of the present FVSOOMM’s implementation, and future work.

• Line 6, defuzzification. Line 13: extra blank space before colon.

Response: The abstract was corrected when the whole paper was re-written to clarify the content and to correct spelling and grammatical errors.

• Line 38-39: the sentence lacks an object (what did Zadeh mention?), there is a typo in “mentionned”, and the next sentence should start with a capitalized word “We”.

Response: We thank the reviewer for bringing this to our attention. The typo in ‘mentionned’ has been corrected and grammar of sentences addressed in the rewrite of the paper.

• The previously mentioned sentence is repeated almost word by word in lines 87-89.

Response: We thank the reviewer for their helpful feedback. The repetition has been eliminated (we tried to identify and eliminate redundancy and repetition when we restructured and re-wrote the paper).

• Line 56: capitalize Results. Title of sections 2.1, 2.5: typos in Litterature and asses (sic). The first sentence of section 2.3, and first sentence of page 4, need improvement.

Response: We thank the reviewer for their helpful feedback. The repetition has been eliminated (we tried to identify and eliminate redundancy and repetition when we restructured and re-wrote the

• There is an extra T right above Figure 2. In the legend of this figure, “sigmoid” is the right word.

Response: We thank the reviewer for bringing this to our attention. The T has been removed and the typo corrected (‘sigmoide’ changed to ‘’sigmoid’)

• The paragraph at the end of page 4 is rather messy.

Response: We thank the reviewer for that feedback. We have modified the wording of the paragraph to try and clarify its meaning and intent.

• In page 5, improve the sentence “Let be an object for each …” and “Let be the object …” at lines 99, 100.

Response: This is due to a French translation problem between the authors. The sentences have been changed and the meaning of “Let be …” has been changed to “Assume that there is …”, or “Consider the…” in English.

• Improve the sentence in lines 121-123 (notice in particular, the repeated “the”).

Response: The whole paragraph was re-written and the sentence reworded. One of the two quotations (the one resulting in the repeated ‘the’) was deleted.

• Line 513: plateform has a typo.

Response: This misspelling occurred throughout the paper -it was a typo from French=>English translation. This was picked up, along with other misspellings, in the English spelling and grammar check and paper re-write. It has been corrected to Platform throughout now.

• The sentence in line 546 lacks a final part (on what?) and then it end with hyphen (-) instead of period (.) All this first paragraph is rather messy.

Response: Thank you for bringing this to our attention. These errors were fixed in the paper re-write.

• Typo in ref. [2] cconnaissances.

Response: The typo was corrected, along with typos found in the proof-read by the native English speaker and the re-write.

• Authors should refer to equations using parentheses

Response: We appreciate the reviewer’s comment - The equations are referred to with links in Latex and are consistent within the paper. All parentheses have been added in the references to equations.

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper entitled "A Time Case-Based Reasoning Plateform Relying on a
Fuzzy Vector Spaces Object Oriented Model and a Method to Design Knowledge Bases and Decision Support Systems in Multiple Domains" (I believe that it should be "Platform" in the title) is an interesting paper but it is written in quite poor English (many sentences are hard to understand and follow). The authors need to engage a professional English proofreader and a native speaker to improve the paper. Apart from that, I have some other comments and suggestions:

1. What is the "previous article presented the fuzzy vector space object oriented model and method (FVSOOMM)"? Which previous article does it refer to?
2. In the Introduction, the structure of the paper needs to be introduced.
3. The authors keep on mentioning "the results section". Which one is that and why to mention it all along in the Introduction?
4. The sources are cited in some strange order (e.g. [3] and then [6]). The number of sources is quite low, additional relevant sources need to be added to the literature review section.
5. Some figures need revising (they are too blurry or do not look that nice and are hard to follow).
6. The Conclusions need to be written up to introduce the outcomes and implications of the study. Also, the pathways of further research should be mentioned. This should be done instead of repeating the information from Abstract and Introduction. Also, citing the sources in the Conclusions is not appropriate.
7. The paper needs a thorough English proofreading.

Author Response

We thank the reviewers for their helpful and constructive feedback. The following are some general comments that address many of the reviewer’s critiques:

• We have taken the views of the reviewers very seriously and have thoroughly modified and rewritten the paper to simplify and clarify the content. The paper has undergone an extensive proof-check and re-write by an English native speaker, correcting the grammar and typos to make it more understandable to readers. We have also caried out some restructuring to correct the flow of ideas and enhance the paper’s readability.

 

• We have changed the title

 

• We have included more references to relevant research (38 -> 78).

 

• We have re-written the Abstract to clarify the presented work.

 

• We have re-written the Introduction section to introduce the structure of the paper.

 

• We have re-written the Discussion and Conclusions sections to reflect the contributions of the paper, the limitations of the present FVSOOMM’s implementation, and future work.

 

• We have expanded sections that indicate rationale for the proposed FVSOOMM model and method.

 

• We have modified captions of figures and tables to clarify and make them more meaningful.

 

• We have expanded sections to fully explain concepts and explain the model, methods and steps, and the platform of FVCOOMM, both theoretically and with their use in the two examples of FVSOOMM’s application implementations.

 

• We will provide a separate file containing the pdf images of Figures and Tables used in the paper, so that they may be configured or resized according to the editor’s discretion.

• an interesting paper but it is written in quite poor English (many sentences are hard to understand and follow). The authors need to engage a professional English proofreader and a native speaker to improve the paper.

Response: We thank the reviewers for their consideration and their very helpful feedback. We have taken the views of the reviewers very seriously and have extensively modified and rewritten the paper to simplify and clarify the content, as well as correcting the grammar and typos with a native English speaker to make it more understandable to readers. We have also caried out restructuring to correct the flow of ideas and enhance the paper’s readability.

• What is the "previous article presented the fuzzy vector space object oriented model and method (FVSOOMM)"? Which previous article does it refer to?

Response: The citation to the paper describing FVSOOMM has been clarified in the Introduction section. The paper is: Colloc, J. Fvsoomm a Fuzzy Vectorial Space Model and Method of Personality, Cognitive Dissonance and Emotion in Decision Making. Information 2020, 11, 229. doi:10.3390/info11040229

• In the Introduction, the structure of the paper needs to be introduced.

Response: The structure of the paper is included at the start of the Introduction.

• The authors keep on mentioning "the results section". Which one is that and why to mention it all along in the Introduction?

Response: The results section has been deleted. Results are indicated in the implementation of the two example applications and discussed in the Discussion section.

• The sources are cited in some strange order (e.g. [3] and then [6]). The number of sources is quite low, additional relevant sources need to be added to the literature review section.

Response: We thank the reviewer for this feedback. It might appear confusing at first. However, the citations indicated are not cited for the first time in the paper. The papers in the Bibliography appear in the order in which they are first mentioned (and first cited) in the paper, so citation numbers are consecutive in the paper, and are in order of the cited article’s first appearance in the paper. So, cited articles are numbered according to the order they appear. Where we refer to papers that have already been cited in previous sections, it may appear confusing. That is ([3], [6]) in a citation refers to paper [3] and to paper [6], which were originally cited in a preceding section of the paper.

• Some figures need revising (they are too blurry or do not look that nice and are hard to follow).

Response: We will submit a separate file of figures that can be resized if required. The paper has been re-written so that the text describes and explains the figures.

• The Conclusions need to be written up to introduce the outcomes and implications of the study. Also, the pathways of further research should be mentioned. This should be done instead of repeating the information from Abstract and Introduction. Also, citing the sources in the Conclusions is not appropriate.

Response: We thank the reviewer for the helpful feedback. The conclusion section has been re-written taking that feedback into account.

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper presents an evolution of a case-based reasoning platform, that was described in previous papers by the same authors, where temporal aspects are accounted for when comparing the cases. As a general comment, the approach is very interesting but its value in the real applications should be better highlighted. Also, the extension of the algorithm with respect to the previous works, as well as the additional experimentation made in the case studies, is not clearly presented.

Specific comments follow.

In the abstract, the sentence "the results show knowledge bases..." is not clear. What are the "scientific" objectives of the experimentation? What is the result with respect to these objectives?

In the Introduction, the contributions are confused with the paper description/summary and the overall description is very confusing. Instead, the introduction should highlight: motivations, novelty of the approach, and, as above, the scientific objectives and a summary of the contributions with respect to these. Given the type pf journal, I would suggest the authors to highlight the contribution on the algorithm and to distinguish it from the software design and from the DSS processes.

Related work should be expanded and should not be part of the main section regarding the contribution. 

Section 2.3 is part of the previous works by the authors but it is not reported as a clear summary, e.g., the definition of f in (4) is not clear, as well as the meaning of f_i,t in (5) just to mention two examples.

Figure 3 is very reach as it represents a workflow to building the DSS, including the activities performed by the end users of the method and the automatic steps. This distinction is not clear. I propose that they highlight this in the figure and, better, use different figures where the different types are highlighted and associated with manual activities.

The meta model represented in Figure 4 is an extension of a previous model. As a general comment, have the authors considered using Object-Oriented patterns, e.g. Gang of Four design patterns for the Composition. What is the relationship with standard meta-models used by object oriented modeling editors? Why interoperability with existing tools is this not a relevant aspect?

As the authors mention the user interfaces, what about validation of tool usability in the case studies? 

In section 2.4.1, are only functions with the same temporal domain used?

The description of the applications in 2.6 are too focused on the application domains. An explicit formulation of the scientific/technical research questions is missing. I suggest to rearrange the subsection accordingly and   highlight the results  of what experimented.

Author Response

Thank you to the reviewer 3 for the helpful feedback to enhance the paper.

We have taken into account his recommandations and we have completed the object-oriented references and espacially those concerning the design patterns addressed in the discussion section.

Object-oriented models have been used to  improve system design and reuse components. We have shown in the discussion part, the advantages and the limits generalization/specialization relationships for knowledge modeling.

However, the subject of the paper mainly concerns the knowledge modeling,  knowledge base design and their implementation in domains like medicine and territorial recomposition.
We have addressed the ODMG and FODMG works and the meta model of the ODMG is completed to fit with the semantic requirements.

The temporal functions are implemented according to the semantic of relevant attributes in the knowledge domain and with the appropriate scales second, minutes, hours, days (in the Pulmonary embolism example) weeks, months, years in the (territorial recomposition example).  

 

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I have no further comments on this version.

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper has been revised and all my comments and suggestions have been taken onboard. I can see significant improvements in the structure, the presentation and the display of results.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your comments that allowed to improve the paper.

English language and style are fine/minor spell check required

Response: A spelling and grammar check was done to correct minor spelling mistakes:

The paper has been revised and all my comments and suggestions have been taken onboard. I can see significant improvements in the structure, the presentation and the display of results.

Response: We thank the reviewer for this acknowledgement. Some spelling errors resulted in different versions of English being used by the authors, such as ‘favour’ instead of ‘favor’; ‘normalised’ instead of ‘normalized’. The document was spell-checked with a standardized dictionary and these typos, as well as some other minor changes were corrected. The specific corrections from the earlier submission are:

Figure 2 Caption - – corrected spelling “membership”

Line 106 – corrected spelling “normalization”

Line 107 – removed ‘a’ in “for a the..”

Figure 7 – corrected spelling “descriptors”

Figure 8 – corrected spelling “constraints” and “launched”

Figure 9 – corrected spelling “which”, “instantiated”, “launched” and “object”

Line 352 – corrected spelling “different”

Line 379 – corrected spelling ”epidemiological”

Line 486 – corrected spelling “materialized”

Line 541 – corrected spelling “approaches”

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors do not have provided a letter with a point-to-point reply reporting the updated text in the paper, so it is really difficult to judge if, how and where in the paper the individual comments have been addressed. Instead, this should always be done.

I noticed that they have expanded the discussion clarifying motivations on the object-oriented modeling part of their work.

I still find the organization and presentation style quite complex and sometimes confusing, especially the figures.

I would prefer that the authors work more on the Introduction to "briefly" list the component/steps of method and then highlight the benefits rather then describing the content of the paper as part of the contribution. For example: 1. Extension of the TFVS model.... This allow.....

2. Design and implementation of a platform ...The novelty of the tool is....

3. A method for temporal case based reasoning...This advances other works as...

Author Response

Round 1

Thank you to the reviewer 3 for the helpful feedback to enhance the paper.

We have taken into account your recommendations and have completed and extended the object-oriented references, especially those concerning the design patterns addressed in the discussion section.

The paper presents an evolution of a case-based reasoning platform, that was described in previous papers by the same authors, where temporal aspects are accounted for when comparing the cases. As a general comment, the approach is very interesting but its value in the real applications should be better highlighted. Also, the extension of the algorithm with respect to the previous works, as well as the additional experimentation made in the case studies, is not clearly presented.

Response: We have taken the views of all the reviewers very seriously and have thoroughly modified and rewritten the paper to simplify and clarify the content. The paper has undergone an extensive proof-check and re-write by an English native speaker, correcting the grammar and typos to make it more understandable to readers. We have also caried out restructuring to correct the flow of ideas, clarify explanations, and enhance the paper’s readability.

Specific comments follow.

In the abstract, the sentence "the results show knowledge bases..." is not clear. What are the "scientific" objectives of the experimentation? What is the result with respect to these objectives?

Response: The abstract has been revised to show the objectives and contributions. It has been re-written to clarify the content. It also now indicates the content coverage more clearly and so strengthens the paper’s contribution to computer science

In the Introduction, the contributions are confused with the paper description/summary and the overall description is very confusing. Instead, the introduction should highlight: motivations, novelty of the approach, and, as above, the scientific objectives and a summary of the contributions with respect to these. Given the type pf journal, I would suggest the authors to highlight the contribution on the algorithm and to distinguish it from the software design and from the DSS processes.

Response: The Introduction has been revised to show the contributions of the paper first and then the structure of the paper follows. As the algorithm is tightly incorporated as part of the FVSOOMM model and method, these are a necessary inclusion.  The paper is published in a special issue « ‘Algorithms in Decision Support Systems Vol. 2’ and the method describes the different steps from the design of the knowledge base until the DSS design and its use in different domains of knowledge.

Related work should be expanded and should not be part of the main section regarding the contribution. 

Response: The description of previous work has been increased and clarified. As well, its relation to the area and its comparison to other approaches has been expanded .40 references have been added.

Section 2.3 is part of the previous works by the authors but it is not reported as a clear summary, e.g., the definition of f in (4) is not clear, as well as the meaning of f_i,t in (5) just to mention two examples.

Response

Line 95-96

Thank you to the reviewer, the definition of f in (4) and f i,t in (5)  was clarified .

"Each attribute xi  of the object is described by a function f and a corresponding vector (figure 1). If the attribute i is changing at each time t, the fuzzy value is calculated by the function is f_i,t (xi,t). The i is the order number of the attribute, xi,t is its value at time t and the scalar alpha_i is the weight of the attribute.

If the attribute i is changing at each time t, the fuzzy value is calculated by the function F_i,t(x_i,t}) where i is the order number of the attribute in the object, x_i,t is its value at each time t and the scalar alpha_i,t is the weight of the attribute in the object. The weight in the object: alpha_i,t or the function F_i,t  could  change over the time (for example : from linear to exponential, or to logarithmic) but it is rarely needed."

 Thus, the description of previous work has been increased and clarified. 

Figure 3 is very reach as it represents a workflow to building the DSS, including the activities performed by the end users of the method and the automatic steps. This distinction is not clear. I propose that they highlight this in the figure and, better, use different figures where the different types are highlighted and associated with manual activities.

Response: The explanation of the various steps that are depicted in Figure 3 has now been expanded and clearly explain the methods depicted in the figure.

The meta model represented in Figure 4 is an extension of a previous model. As a general comment, have the authors considered using Object-Oriented patterns, e.g. Gang of Four design patterns for the Composition. What is the relationship with standard meta-models used by object oriented modeling editors? Why interoperability with existing tools is this not a relevant aspect?

Response: The authors appreciate the reviewer's feedback. Figure 4 was introduced to explain the relevance of the FVSOOMM extensions in the discussion of the FVSOOM methods (specifically step 2 in lines 146-152). The explanation and relevance of the extensions (Figure 4) to other works has been expanded and included in the Discussion section.

As the authors mention the user interfaces, what about validation of tool usability in the case studies? 

Response: We have expanded sections to fully explain concepts and explain the model, methods and steps, and the platform of FVSOOMM, both theoretically and with their use in the two examples of FVSOOMM’s application implementations. The limitations of the present implementation has been described in the Discussion section, where suggestions for future work to improve the implementation is also presented.

In section 2.4.1, are only functions with the same temporal domain used?

Response: The temporal functions are implemented according to the semantics of relevant attributes in their respective knowledge domains, and with appropriate temporal dimensions of time: seconds, minutes, hours, days (in the Pulmonary embolism example); and weeks, months, years in the (territorial recomposition example).

The description of the applications in 2.6 are too focused on the application domains. An explicit formulation of the scientific/technical research questions is missing. I suggest to rearrange the subsection accordingly and   highlight the results  of what experimented.

Response:

The paper describes several very different applications and thus it is not bounded on one application domain. Moreover, we have  recalled that in a previous paper [1] the cognitive dissonance and emotion in marketing were presented.

The paper does not rely on statistics in a population  but offers algorithms to implement temporal case-base reasoning and assess clinical cases.

The implementation of FVSOOMM is currently being used for Pulmonary Embolism diagnosis in Burkina-Faso, however the success of this is not yet available.

The work on municipality in territorial recomposition is currently being used in a ground study concerning the emotion of  mayors and the knowledge is described and was published in [58] (Loubet, L. Emotions d'élus et découpage territorial. Recompositions intercommunales dans l’aire urbaine havraise. L'Espace Politique 2020. doi:10.4000/espacepolitique.7268).

We have re-written the Discussion and Conclusions sections to reflect the contributions of the paper, the limitations of the present FVSOOMM’s implementation, and future work.

 

Round 2

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The authors do not have provided a letter with a point-to-point reply reporting the updated text in the paper, so it is really difficult to judge if, how and where in the paper the individual comments have been addressed. Instead, this should always be done.

Thank you for having reviewed our article and sorry about not having done a point-to-point reporting because your participation to the review process was not sure and thus we have just taken into account your valuable comments to enhance the paper especially concerning the object-oriented modeling. 

The paper was extensively edited and modified in light of all reviewers’ comments. In the process of being checked and re-written, more citations and their explanations were added, as well as additional discussion and material that was corrected by a native English speaker.

I noticed that they have expanded the discussion clarifying motivations on the object-oriented modeling part of their work.

These motivations are well known. We have been working since 1986 on object-oriented modeling and we have detected the so called ‘diamond problem’ of specialization multiple inheritance very early in 1989. We have published a paper in the IFIP conference in 1992 [48]  and another in OOIS’94 [63] conference accepted by the international object oriented community for a long time. Thirty years ago, these papers proposed the composition multiple inheritance without conflict and how to use it to detect structural similarity and heterogenicity in multidatabases [48]. As the reviewer knows, the diamond problem (The specialization hierachy is a lattice of Galois) has no solution and until today the object-oriented approach continues to suffer from this pitfall as described in the discussion session and on figure 32.

 

I still find the organization and presentation style quite complex and sometimes confusing, especially the figures.

 

Thank you to the reviewer for highlighting the complexity of our approach which therefore justifies explanations. Our article deals with very complex domains (medicine, territorial recomposition), such as the bifurcation of a patient’s condition, not only at their initial state and their past clinical history, but also dynamically with their evolving clinical state according to their clinical parameters that describes their clinical evolution. Unlike traditional approaches, that simply utilize statistics in a population to try to deduce the most possible diagnosis. Our approach concerns the reasoning from temporal cases and makes it possible to detect the pathological evolutions of each patient and the moment where the disease appears. This is essential for the physician.

This article is submitted for publication in a special issue ‘Algorithms in Decision Support Systems Vol. 2’.  It is therefore legitimate to speak of decision support systems in domains of complex applications, such as medicine. We tried to explain the figures as much as possible, however some are the result of other papers and we have indicated links to those earlier works, in which they are more fully described, such as in the assessment of emotional behaviour and cognitive dissonance described in a previous article in the bibliography (Colloc, J. Fvsoomm a Fuzzy Vectorial Space Model and Method of Personality, Cognitive Dissonance Emotion in Decision Making. Information 2020,11, 229. doi:10.3390/infol1040229.)

 As for figures? Which ones? there are 32 of them and each figure in pdf can be enlarged so that the details can be examined. In addition we provide the figures separately.

 

I would prefer that the authors work more on the Introduction to "briefly" list the component/steps of method and then highlight the benefits rather then describing the content of the paper as part of the contribution. For example:

1. Extension of the TFVS model.... This allow.....

 

Response:

The Introduction has been revised to show the contributions of the paper first and then the structure of the paper follows. As the algorithm is tightly incorporated as part of the FVSOOMM model and method, these are a necessary inclusion. We have changed the introduction line [154-160] to present as you have suggested. We have taken the reviewer’s advice and modified the 3 contributions in the Introduction section.

2. Design and implementation of a platform ...The novelty of the tool is....

The design and implementation of the platform are represented as a novel approach in the Introduction section, when compared to previous work.

 

3. A method for temporal case based reasoning...This advances other works as...

A list of main CBR references was provided in the article. Our method proposes a method for managing temporal case based reasoning as part of an object-oriented approach based on composition. This is now well explained in the Introduction.

 

 

Round 3

Reviewer 3 Report

The reply to my comments is quite detailed and clarity of presentation has been improved.