Ralph Bergmann, Wolfgang Wilke, Ivo Vollrath, Stefan Wess

• When problems are solved through reasoning from cases, the primary kind of knowledge is contained in the specific cases which are stored in the case base. However, in many situations additional background-knowledge is required to cope with the requirements of an application. We describe an approach to integrate such general knowledge into the reasoning process in a way that it complements the knowledge contained in the cases. This general knowledge itself is not sufficient to perform any kind of model-based problem solving, but it is required to interpret the available cases appropriately. Background knowledge is expressed by two different kinds of rules that both must be formalized by the knowledge engineer: Completion rules describe how to infer additional features out of known features of an old case or the current query case. Adaptation rules describe how an old case can be adapted to fit the current query. This paper shows how these kinds of rules can be integrated into an object-oriented case representation.