Related Areas

Abstract

As already mentioned in the introduction of this book, case-based reasoning has its origins in cognitive science and artificial intelligence:

• Cognitive science was looking for a model of human problem solving.

• Artificial Intelligence was searching for means to overcome the shortcomings of rule-based expert system for generic and effective problem solving methods.

Because of that interdisciplinary tradition and the generality of the approach, case-based reasoning found widespread use in a great variety of application domains. The previous chapters gave an impressive demonstration of this fact. We have seen the integration of many different techniques and methods with the case-based reasoning approach. It has become clear that CBR is a generic methodology for building knowledge-based systems, rather than an isolated technique that is capable of solving only very specific tasks.

Because of its integrative nature, it is not surprising that most publications that cover the topic of CBR extensively, contain a chapter (or a section) concerning the relations between CBR and various other disciplines.

The previous chapters focused on the use of CBR for specific applications. In this very last chapter, we will step back and take a look at the relations between CBR and various neighboring disciplines from an applicationindependent point of view.

Obviously, we have to restrict ourselves to a selection of related areas. Our focus is on aspects concerning the relations to other fields in computer science and artificial intelligence, the relationship to cognitive science must be neglected, but is covered excellently in other publications (e.g. Kolodner 1993).