Exemplar Use Cases

We showcase the utility and ability of the Explanation Ontology to represent use cases that span representative and high-precision domains of finance and healthcare. In each of these use cases, we show how the EO can represent explanations in instances where outputs of AI methods have been produced. We also show visually show against each use case, the explanation types inferred when the Protege reasoner is run on these use case knowledge graphs. Each of these use case files, both the original and inferred KGs, have been made available on our Github.

Use CaseExplanation Types InferredFile
ClinicalContrastiveClinical Example
Food RecommendationContrastive and ContextualFood Rec. Example
Proactive RetentionRationaleProactive Retention Example
Health Survey AnalysisCase based and ContextualNHANES Example
Medical ExpenditureDataMedical Expenditure Example
Credit ApprovalData, Case based and ContrastiveCredit Approval Example

Example from Clinical Requirement Gatherings Session

We present an example of how our explanations ontology could be used to address a question, "Why Drug B over Drug A?" that clearly requires a contrastive explanation. Given that a contrastive explanation is the most suitable explanation type to address this question, our ontology if loaded into a system can help guide a system designer to locate the facts in support of Drug A and foil in support/against Drug B. While this is a real question that was asked by one of the clincians to a prototype decision support tool that we built to walk them through a complicated type-2 diabetes patient case, we omit the exact explanation as it is difficult to explain without the entire context of the patient case and the knowledge available to the system. Instead, we present an abstracted up example of a contrastive explanation in Fig. 2.

Fig 2. A visual overview of the RDF representation of a contrastive explanation that addresses the question, "Why Drug B over A?"

The RDF snippet can be browsed at and is available within our Github repository at : https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tetherless-world/explanation-ontology/master/annotations/contrastiveexp.rdf