A Case-Based Personal Travel Assistant
for Elaborating User Requirements and Assessing Offers

Lorcan Coyle, Pdraig Cunningham, and Conor Hayes

Department of Computer Science
Trinity College Dublin
{Lorcan.Coyle, Padraig.Cunningham, Conor.Hayes}@cs.tcd.ie


Abstract. This paper describes a case-based approach to user profiling in a Personal 
Travel Assistant (based on the 1998 FIPA Travel Scenario). The approach 
is novel in that the user profile is made up of a set of cases capturing
previous interactions rather than as a single composite case. This has the advantage 
that the profile is always up-to-date and also allows for the borrowing of
cases from similar users when coverage is poor. Profile data is retrieved from a
database in an XML format and loaded into a case-retrieval net in memory.
This case-retrieval net is then used to support the two key tasks of requirements
elaboration and ranking offers.
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