Semantic Integration of Heterogeneous Information Sources Using a Knowledge-Based System
Thomas L. Adams, James Dullea, Peter E. Clark, Suryanarayana M. Sripada, Thomas Barrett, Boeing Phantom · 2000
A growing number of decision support applications require the ability to formulate ad hoc queries that access information from heterogeneous information sources. The Boeing Company recently conducted a study to investigate the feasibility of applying a highperformance knowledge base to interface the information sources to the decision support system. A commercially available knowledge-based development environment provided a number of useful features for this problem including an expressive knowledge representation language, an efficient inference engine, and a large repository of common-sense knowledge. Our objectives were to determine if the pre-stored knowledge would significantly reduce the time required for knowledge engineering in large scale applications, to determine if the domain model was expressive enough to support the wide range of ad-hoc queries typical of our applications, and to determine if the common-sense knowledge would extend the inference power beyond simply combining information from the available data sources.