Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

ASK TOM represents a new approach to structuring access to a newly emergent kind of knowledge base, the video case library. It is based on two premises: First, that cases and stories in the form of video clips can provide much of the viscerality and memorability that is lacking from textual forms of presentation; and second, that AI theories, specifically the approaches to memory organization derived from work in case-based reasoning, can provide the structure that is essential to achieving the shared context that makes communication possible. The aspect of AI research that is crucial in providing this structure does not concern algorithms. Rather, it is the content of domains and tasks that is paramount.