Thepaperscollectedin thisvolumewerepresentedatthe ?fth EuropeanWo- shoponCase-BasedReasoning(EWCBR2K)heldTrento,Italy.EWCBR2K was the last episode of a series of very successful meetings held previously in Kaiserslautern (1993), Paris (1994), Lausanne (1996) and Dublin (1998) that traditionally attract European and international researchers and practitioners in case-basedreasoning. Case-based reasoning is a recent ?eld of research with a long history of - plications. The organization of the volume is consistent with this vision of the ?eld and, afteran initial partdevotedto the invited papers,the twomain parts containresearchandapplicationpapersrespectively.The overallresultisa r- resentative snapshot of current researchand state-of-the-artapplications. The meritforthisvolumegoestotheauthorsofthepapers,theProgramCommittee andalltheadditionalreviewerswhosecombinede?ortproducedthishigh-quality scienti?c work.
The organizers would like to thank all the people who contributed to the success of the workshop: in particular, Francesco Ricci who originally proposed to have EWCBR2K in Italy; Fausto Giunchiglia, Paolo Traverso and Oliviero Stock who backed the proposal and assured the institutional committment of ITC-irst and University of Trento; Paolo Avesani, Mehmet Goeker and Michel Manago who developed the traditional industrial-day into the ?rst edition of Innovative Customer Centered Applications (ICCA), a co-located event with a focused target on industry people; Giampaolo Avancini, Sara Beatrici, Morena Carli, Carola Dori, Alessandro Tuccio, of ITC-IRST and Fabrizio Di Bartolo of UniversityoftheEasternPiedmontwhoweree?ective,professionalandfriendly whileprovidingtechnicalandadministrativesupportfortheorganizationofthe event. We would like to o?er thanks for the support provided by EWCBR-98, MLNET,theItalianAssociationforArti?cialIntelligence(AI*IA)andthe- partmentofAdvancedSciencesandTechnologies(DISTA)oftheUniversityof EasternPiedmont(Universit' adelPiemonteOrientale"A.Avogadro").Aspecial thanktotheinvitedspeakersBarrySmythandQiangYangandtoallthechairs ofthesessionsand?nally,toSpringer-Verlagfortheirhelpandtheirenthusiastic agreementon the publication of this volume.