Advances in Case-Based Reasoning: 6th European Conference, ECCBR 2002 Aberdeen, Scotland, UK, September 4-7, 2002 Proceedings

The papers collected in this volume were presented at the 6th European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ECCBR 2002) held at The Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, UK. This conference followed a series of very successful well-established biennial European workshops held in Trento, Italy (2000), Dublin, Ireland (1998), Lausanne, Switzerland (1996), and Paris, France (1994), after the initial workshop in Kaiserslautern, Germany (1993). These meetings have a history of attracting first-class European and international researchers and practitioners in the years interleaving with the biennial international counterpart ICCBR; the 4th ICCBR Conference was held in Vancouver, Canada in 2001. Proceedings of ECCBR and ICCBR conferences are traditionally published by Springer-Verlag in their LNAI series. Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) is an AI problem-solving approach where problems are solved by retrieving and reusing solutions from similar, previously solved problems, and possibly revising the retrieved solution to reject differences between the new and retrieved problems. Case knowledge stores the previously solved problems and is the main knowledge source of a CBR system. A main focus of CBR research is the representation, acquisition and maintenance of case knowledge. Recently other knowledge sources have been recognized as important: indexing, similarity and adaptation knowledge. Significant knowledge engineering effort may be needed for these, and so the representation, acquisition and maintenance of CBR knowledge more generally have become important.