This book presents case-based reasoning in a systematic approach with two goals: to present rigorous and formally valid structures for precise case-based reasoning, and to demonstrate the range of techniques, methods, and tools available for many applications.
A statement of George Bernhard Shaw is essentially this:
“The wisdom of a person is not measured by the number of experiences but rather
by the ability to make use of them”.
This characterises case-based reasoning (CBR) to a large degree. It is easy
to record billions of experiences in a database. However, the central question is:
If I have a problem, which experience should I consult and in what way? Humans
have cultivated this in very clever ways. So, what prevents us from collecting experiences
on a computer? Nothing: Collection is easily done. The problem is now to
realise the second part of Shaw’s statement on a computer. This has been neglected
for a long time and is still not a standard in university education.
This difficulty is obvious: The new problem is not exactly like that in the experience
base, and even if we find a good one quite similar, it cannot be used exactly in
the same way as it was used in the past.
