Dictionary.net

(CBR) A technique for problemsolving which looks for previous examples which are similar tothe current problem. This is useful where heuristicknowledge is not available.There are many situations where experts are not happy to bequestioned about their knowledge by people who want to writethe knowledge in rules, for use in expert systems. In mostof these situations, the natural way for an expert to describehis or her knowledge is through examples, stories or cases(which are all basically the same thing). Such an expert willteach trainees about the expertise by apprenticeship, i.e. bygiving examples and by asking the trainees to remember them,copy them and adapt them in solving new problems if theydescribe situations that are similar to the new problems. CBRaims to exploit such knowledge.Some key research areas are efficient indexing, how to define"similarity" between cases and how to use temporalinformation.