ECCBR 2008 is the 9th European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) following a series of successful European conferences and workshops. This four-day conference will be held at the University of Trier in Germany. The conference programme will include invited talks, oral and poster presentations as well as workshops (see separate calls) on both fundamental and applied research in CBR. Additionally, the Industry Day will focus on industrial-strength technology and industrial applications of CBR. A new element of the ECCBR programme is the Computer Cooking Contest (CCC) intended as a CBR system competition (see separate call) demonstrating the application of case retrieval, adaptation, and combination methods for cooking recipes.

Submission Topics
The ECCBR 2008 Program Committee invites submissions of original research and application papers on all aspects of Case-Based Reasoning, such as:

• Representation, modelling, acquisition, adaptation, maintenance and visualization of cases, similarity measures, ontologies, and other knowledge relevant for CBR
• Methods and tools for retrieval, reuse, revision and retention in CBR
• Theoretical foundations of CBR
• Human Computer Interaction: CBR user interfaces, conversational CBR, personalization, user modelling and context, explanation
• Distributed CBR including agent architectures, service-oriented architectures, or peer-to-peer networks for or involving CBR
• Integration of CBR with other methods, such as: rule-based reasoning, ontological reasoning, model-based reasoning, constraint satisfaction problem solving and optimisation, information retrieval, machine learning, natural language processing, etc.
• CBR systems for specific tasks, such as: planning, scheduling, design, workflow management and process enactment, diagnosis, decision support, classification
• Analogical reasoning, cognitive models, creative reasoning, and argumentation approaches based on or related to CBR
• Formal, empirical, and psychological evaluations of CBR models, components, and systems
• Methodologies and tools to support the development, operation, and maintenance of CBR applications
• Applications of CBR, for example in customer support, electronic commerce, pattern recognition, image processing, legal reasoning, education, manufacturing, process control, signal processing, robotics, ambient intelligence
• CBR-related areas such as: knowledge and experience management, corporate memories, decision support, information retrieval, instance-based learning, software reuse, and engineering redesign

In addition to those general aspects, ECCBR 2008 will put a particular focus on two special areas with relevance to CBR. We call for conference submissions as well as workshops related to the following areas:

The Role of CBR in the Future Internet (Area Chair: Enric Plaza)
With the Web 2.0 and 3.0 and particularly with the emergence of social networks and social software, there is a new opportunity for CBR to support the sharing and reuse of experience from/for communities of people. Related to this area, the following topics are relevant:

• Acquisition, representation and processing of personal experience, opinions, and practical knowledge
• Social tagging and folksonomies as representations for CBR
• Natural language processing for case extraction from text
• Reuse of experience in Wikis, Blogs, RSS-feeds and all kinds of multi-media formats
• Emergent semantics from usage of experience in a community of users
• Combination of experience from different users or sources (ensemble effect, collaborative recommendation)
• CBR in the context of the semantic web and service-oriented architectures

CBR in Healthcare (Area Co-Chairs: Isabelle Bichindaritz, Stefania Montani)
The opportunities for applying CBR in healthcare are significantly increasing during the past years and expand its application beyond traditional medical diagnosis. The following topics are relevant:

• Evidence-based medicine and CBR
• Medical decision-support systems (partially) using CBR
• CBR in point-of-care diagnostics, personalized monitoring, and prediction of adverse events
• CBR and knowledge discovery from electronic health records
• Case-based processing of medical guidelines
• CBR in enabling technologies for those with physical disabilities or chronic health problems
• Integration of CBR-based solutions in health care environments
• CBR in medical imaging
• Theoretical frameworks for CBR in medical reasoning
• Applications of CBR in bioinformatics

Submissions
Authors must submit a full paper with a maximum of 15 pages through the ECCBR web site by the paper submission deadline. The details of the submission procedure will be published in time at the ECCBR web site. All accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings published by Springer Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series.

Review Criteria
Submissions must be identified as either research or application papers and will be reviewed using criteria appropriate to their category. Review criteria for research papers will include scientific significance, originality, technical quality, and clarity. Review criteria for application papers will include practical or economic significance, potential to lead to more powerful technology, technical quality, and clarity. Further, as we aim at highlighting contributions to the special areas amongst the submissions on the above topics, the authors must indicate whether a submission should be considered to one of these areas

Important Dates

Conference Chairs Klaus-Dieter Althoff, University of Hildesheim Ralph Bergmann, University of Trier	Local Chair Mirjam Minor, University of Trier
Industry Day Chair Ralph Traphöner, empolis	Workshop Chair Martin Schaaf, University of Hildesheim
Computer Cooking Contest Chairs Ralph Traphöner, empolis Mirjam Minor, University of Trier Armin Stahl, DFKI

ECCBR 2008 is organized on behalt of GI: Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V.