Abstract
Structural relationships between scope positions — including structural containment, partial overlap, and generalisation — can determine the reuse eligibility of prior sealed decision records, producing non-binary applicability outcomes where different relationships carry qualitatively different reuse implications. This publication discloses methods and systems that evaluate defined structural relationships between scope positions rather than content similarity, exact-match identity, or administrative classification to discover and reuse prior decisions. In one embodiment, when a new decision request arrives at a request contextual position, the system evaluates structural relationships between the request contextual position and stored record contextual positions to determine whether prior decisions are applicable and how they apply. Some relationships may permit direct satisfaction of the new request while others may only provide supporting context, enabling differentiated applicability outcomes with different downstream implications depending on the structural relationship. In one embodiment, reuse eligibility requires satisfaction of multiple independent compatibility dimensions evaluated in conjunction, including positional compatibility, evaluation-context compatibility, and specification-version compatibility. Structural relationships between scope positions may be self-derivable from the scope representations themselves without requiring external administrative mapping. In one embodiment, systems may perform hierarchical context matching by checking for reusable prior decisions before initiating fresh evaluation, enabling scope-based record retrieval as a prior decision discovery mechanism. The disclosed approaches establish structural reuse as an alternative to similarity-based retrieval techniques such as case-based reasoning and retrieval-augmented generation. Structural relationship evaluation from the authorization domain is applied to the decision reuse problem through non-similarity-based retrieval with scope containment and decision precedent matching.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Winchester, Jayson, "Hierarchical Context Matching for Decision Record Retrieval — Structural vs Similarity-Based Reuse", Technical Disclosure Commons, (February 19, 2026)
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/9350