A First Step Towards Automated Knowledge Integration

Knowledge integration is the process of incorporating new information into a body of existing knowledge (Murray and Porter, 1989). This process is a cycle of knowledge acquisition, formulation, recognition, elaboration, and adaptation. Knowledge acquisition is the act of gathering facts. These facts must be formulated into the language of the underlying representation of some knowledge base. Recognition is a preliminary identification of what piece of existing knowledge is most closely related to the new information. Elaboration makes inferences that are based on combining the new information with the existing knowledge. Adaptation involves moderating inconsistencies between the knowledge base and the new information. The process aims to create knowledge bases used in reasoning.