Information Sharing and Knowledge Merging in Cooperative Information Systems

Information sharing is the key issue in cooperative information systems. This issue is studied from a logical point of views in this paper. It is assumed that information in each component system is stored in a knowledge base expressed by a set of logical sentences. A formal method for merging multiple knowledge bases that might connict each other is presented. The method has a number of interesting properties such as reeecting the views of majority and syntax-independence. It is shown by example that this method appears to resolve connicts among the knowledge bases in a plausible way, and that the method can be implemented by an eecient syntactical transformation from the set of knowledge bases to be merged.