This book presents a selection of recent progress, issues, and directions for the future of case-based reasoning. It includes chapters addressing fundamental issues and approaches in indexing and retrieval, situation assessment and similarity assessment, and in case adaptation. Those chapters provide a "case-based" view of key problems and solutions in context of the tasks for which they were developed.

It also presents lessons learned about how to design CBR systems and how to apply them to real-world problems. The final chapters include a perspective on the state of the field and the most important directions for future impact.

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The case studies presented involve a broad sampling of tasks, such as design, education, legal reasoning, planning, decision support, problem-solving, and knowledge navigation. In addition, they experimentally examine one of the fundamental tenets of CBR, that reasoning from prior experiences improves performance.

The chapters also address other issues that, while not restricted to CBR per se, have been vigorously attacked by the CBR community, including creative problem-solving, strategic memory search, and opportunistic retrieval. This volume provides a vision of the present, and a challenge for the future, of case-based reasoning research and applications.