Knowledge Integration for Building Organizational Memories

The paper starts with a discussion of the roles an organizational memory (OM) should play and what kind of knowledge should go into it. We then identify two kinds of integration problems. The rst one is concerned with integrating the knowledge bases of diierent knowledge-based systems employed in an organization into one physically or virtually uniied knowledge base which is to be considered as part of the organization's OM. The second problem concerns the integration of several representations of the same knowledge with diierent degrees of formalization, ranging from formally represented knowledge via semi-structured text to plain text. It is argued to solve the two integration problems by making use of a high-level language whose representation ontology is explicitly deened. Such a language is rather comprehensive, but only parts of it are used at a time and actual inferencing is done in optimized, low-level formalisms to which this language is compiled.