As the previous chapters of this book have shown, case-based reasoning is a technology that has been successfully applied to a large range of different tasks. Through all the different CBR projects, both basic research projects as well as industrial development projects, lots of knowledge and experience about how to build a CBR application has been collected. Today, there is already an increasing number of successful companies developing industrial CBR applications. In former days, these companies could develop their early pioneering CBR applications in an ad-hoc manner. The highly-skilled CBR expert of the company was able to manage these projects and to provide the developers with the required expertise.

Although several systematic analyses of existing approaches to adaptation have been published recently, a general formal adaptation framework is still missing. This paper presents a step into the direction of developing such a formal model of transformational adaptation. The model is based on the notion of the quality of a solution to a problem, while quality is meant in a more general sense and can also denote some kind of appropriateness, utility, or degree of correctness. Adaptation knowledge is then defined in terms of functions transforming one case into a successor case. The notion of quality provides us with a semantics for adaptation knowledge and allows us to define terms like soundness, correctness and completeness. In this view, adaptation (and even the whole CBR process) appears to be a special instance of an optimization problem.

This paper motivates the necessity for support for negotiation during Sales Support on the Internet within Case-Based Reasoning solutions. Different negotiation approaches are discussed and a general model of the sales process is presented. Further, the tradition al CBR-cycle is modified in such a way that iterative retrieval during a CBR consulting session is covered by the new model. Several gen eral characteristics of negotiation are described and a case study is shown where preliminary approaches are used to negotiate with a cu stomer about his demands and available products in a 'CBR-based' Electronic Commerce solution.

Contrary to symbolic learning approaches, that represent a learned concept explicitly, case-based approaches describe concepts implicitly by a pair (CB; sim), i.e. by a measure of similarity sim and a set CB of cases. This poses the question if there are any differences concerning the learning power of the two approaches. In this article we will study the relationship between the case base, the measure of similarity, and the target concept of the learning process. To do so, we transform a simple symbolic learning algorithm (the version space algorithm) into an equivalent case-based variant. The achieved results strengthen the hypothesis of the equivalence of the learning power of symbolic and casebased methods and show the interdependency between the measure used by a case-based algorithm and the target concept.

Programs are linguistic structures which contain identifications of individuals: memory locations, data types, classes, objects, relations, functions etc. must be identified selectively or definingly. The first part of the essay which deals with identification by showing and designating is rather short, whereas the remaining part dealing with paraphrasing is rather long. The reason is that for an identification by showing or designating no linguistic compositions are needed, in contrast to the case of identification by paraphrasing. The different types of functional paraphrasing are covered here in great detail because the concept of functional paraphrasing is the foundation of functional programming. The author had to decide whether to cover this subject here or in his essay Purpose versus Form of Programs where the concept of functional programming is presented. Finally, the author came to the conclusion that this essay on identification is the more appropriate place.

The term enterprise modelling, synonymous with enterprise engineering, refers to methodologies developed for modelling activities, states, time, and cost within an enterprise architecture. They serve as a vehicle for evaluating and modelling activities resources etc. CIM - OSA (Computer Integrated Manufacturing Open Systems Architecture) is a methodology for modelling computer integrated environments, and its major objective is the appropriate integration of enterprise operations by means of efficient information exchange within the enterprise. PERA is another methodology for developing models of computer integrated manufacturing environments. The department of industrial engineering in Toronto proposed the development of ontologies as a vehicle for enterprise integration. The paper reviews the work carried out by various researchers and computing departments on the area of enterprise modelling and points out other modelling problems related to enterprise integration.

This paper summarizes the work presented at the WETICE '98 workshop on "Coordinating Distributed Software Development Projects" as well as the ensuing discussions that arose in the course of the workshop.

The paper addresses two problems of comprehensible proof presentation, the hierarchically structured presentation at the level of proof methods and different presentation styles of construction proofs. It provides solutions for these problems that can make use of proof plans generated by an automated proof planner.

Interoperability between different CAx systems involved in the development process of cars is presently one of the most critical issues in the automotive industry. None of the existing CAx systems meets all requirements of the very complex process network of the lifecycle of a car. With this background, industrial engineers have to use various CAx systems to get an optimal support for their daily work. Today, the communication between different CAx systems is done via data files using special direct converters or neutral system independent standards like IGES, VDAFS, and recently STEP, the international standard for product data description. To reduce the dependency on individual CAx s ystem vendors, the German automotive industry developed an open CAx system architecture based on STEP as guiding principle for CAx system development. The central component of this architecture is a common, system-independent access interface to CAx functions and data of all involved CAx systems, which is under development in the project ANICA. Within this project, a CAx object bus has been developed based on a STEP data description using CORBA as an integration platform. This new approach allows a transparent access to data and functions of the integrated CAx systems without file-based data exchange. The product development process with various CAx systems concerns objects from different CAx systems. Thus, mechanisms are needed to handle the persistent storage of the CAx objects distributed over the CAx object bus to give the developing engineers a consistent view of the data model of their product. The following paper discusses several possibilities to guarantee consistent data management and storage of distributed CAx models. One of the most promising approaches is the enhancement of the CAx object bus by a STEP-based object-oriented data server to realise a central data management.