Source : Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing

case based reasoning
     
         (CBR) A technique for problem
        solving which looks for previous examples which are similar to
        the current problem.  This is useful where {heuristic}
        {knowledge} is not available.
     
        There are many situations where experts are not happy to be
        questioned about their knowledge by people who want to write
        the knowledge in rules, for use in {expert systems}.  In most
        of these situations, the natural way for an expert to describe
        his or her knowledge is through examples, stories or cases
        (which are all basically the same thing).  Such an expert will
        teach trainees about the expertise by apprenticeship, i.e. by
        giving examples and by asking the trainees to remember them,
        copy them and adapt them in solving new problems if they
        describe situations that are similar to the new problems.  CBR
        aims to exploit such knowledge.
     
        Some key research areas are efficient indexing, how to define
        "similarity" between cases and how to use temporal
        information.
     
        (1996-05-28)