Merging structured text using temporal knowledge

Structured text is a general concept that is implicit in a variety of approaches to handling information. Syntactically, an item of structured text is a number of grammatically simple phrases together with a semantic label for each phrase. Items of structured text may be nested within larger items of structured text. Much information is potentially available as structured text including tagged text in XML, text in relational and object-oriented databases, and the output from information extraction systems in the form of instantiated templates. In a previous paper, we presented a framework for merging items of potentially inconsistent structured text Hun00a]. In this paper, we extend that framework by considering the need to use temporal knowledge. The primary aim of this paper is to specify the language and types of axioms required in this temporal knowledge.