Decision Rationales as Models for Explanations

A decision rationale describes the reasons for a decision in an engineering or software development process, so it is a kind of explanation. Conversely, explanations are commonly for decisions that have been made. In this article, we develop a reference ontology for decision rationales, which captures the common features of explanations for decisions in a domain-independent manner. The intention is to tie together the many techniques for explainability in different domains so that the techniques can be shared and possibly even interoperate with one another.