Structured Knowledge Source Integration and its applications to information fusion

Structured Knowledge Source Integration, or SKSI, is an ongoing research and development project at Cycorp intended to enable the Cyc knowledge base to integrate (access, query, assimilate, and merge) a variety of external structured knowledge sources, such as databases, spreadsheets, XML or DAML tagged text, GIS datasets, and queryable Web pages. With SKSI, the Cyc knowledge base will be able to draw upon information obtained from multiple knowledge sources when answering complex queries, to assimilate (transform and store) the contents of the knowledge sources directly into the Cyc knowledge base, and to mediate between several semantically similar knowledge sources. These capabilities will extend the flexibility and power of the Cyc product to serve as the universal ontology and knowledge repository in any application requiring knowledge based reasoning. This article discusses some of the main technical issues of knowledge source integration, reviews some of the literature on the subject, describes some elements of the SKSI approach, illustrates two example Cyc queries that use two structured knowledge sources already mapped into Cyc, and proposes a Schema Modeling Toolkit of applications we are designing to leverage the core SKSI development.