Distributed CBR using XML

CBR (case-based reasoning) has considerable potential for developing intelligent assistants for the World Wide Web. Several case-based intelligent applications already exist on the web but these applications follow a thin client model with the intelligence located at the server side. In this paper we explore the advantages of making these applications more distributed. We illustrate the kinds of application where the dialogue with the case-base is long-lived and network latency or server load would suggest that some of the processing should be distributed to the client side. We present an architecture for such a distributed CBR system and describe how a case-representation language based on XML can facilitate this distribution. The advantages of adopting an XML case-representation language are interoperability and flexibility of reuse and these are discussed in the second half of the paper.