Introduction

The purpose of this introduction is to provide the basic concepts of Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) underlying the chapters in this book in order to provide a unified terminology. It is not intended as an introductory text to a novice (this would, e.g., require the elaboration of examples and many more details) but rather to fix the language and to avoid unnecessary repetitions of elementary definitions in the following chapters. This introduction is split into sections dealing with knowledge representation in generalspecific terms in CBRthe general structure of CBR-systemsthe main application areas of CBR.