APL'2002 Madrid Proceedings Exhaustive Representation of Multiple Instances using Base-value Discriminants Georges Brigham President and CEO - Qualedi, Inc. 121 West Main Street, Milford, CT 06460, USA e-mail: GBrigham@Qualedi.com Main topics: date/time; document status; base-value; discriminants. Background. In the course of developing a major transaction system (for Electronic Document Interchange), used by upwards of a thousand companies or agencies, based on about two hundred different types of documents, it has been necessary to test the system continually, of course, but without ever being able to define exhaustively all the cases to be considered. Strictly speaking, if by now 10 million documents have been generated or interpreted by this system, then there have been 10 million different cases. Even if one could specify all factors to be considered and the values each can take on, which we cannot do, the combination of cases to be considered would reach an astronomical number. By default, one then categorizes cases and generalizes to arrive at some subsets which one hopes have no exceptions, and one verifies each subset. Knowledge, experience, intuition; a little luck, and some failures discovered by some users in the field ultimately result in a fairly rugged system and
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