Knowledge Integration for Building Organisational Memories

The paper starts with a discussion of the roles an organisational 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 organisation into one physically or virtually uniied knowledge base which is to be considered as part of the organisation'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. This is an issue because formally represented knowledge, e.g. company regulations, often also exists in textual form, and both representations are needed for diierent kinds of tasks. It is argued that the two integration problems mentioned can only be solved by making use of a high-level language whose representation constructs are on the conceptual level (in the sense of Brachman) and which covers all representational needs. We argue that such a language can be made easy to use despite its being extremely comprehensive if the representational ontology underlying its constructs is represented explicitly.