Knowledge Fusion Patterns for Context Aware Decision Support

Background

Based on the analysis of knowledge fusion studies, a number of knowledge fusion processes can be distinguished:

• 1.

  Intelligent fusion of massive amounts of heterogeneous data / information from a wide range of distributed sources into a form which may be used by systems and humans as the foundation for problem solving and decision making (Scherl & Ulery, 2004; Alun et al., 2001).

• 2.

  Integration of knowledge from various knowledge sources (KSs) resulting in a completely different type of knowledge or new idea how to solve the problem (Lee, 2007; Grebla, Cenan & Stanca, 2010). Integration of different types of knowledge (domain, procedural, derived, presentation, etc.) resulting in a new knowledge type (Holsapple & Whinston, 1986) and integration of multiple KSs into a new knowledge object (Kuo, Tseng, & Lin, 2003; Gou, Yang, & Chen, 2005) belong to this type of knowledge fusion.

• 3.

  Combining knowledge from different autonomous KSs in different ways in different scenarios, which results in discovery of new relations between the knowledge from different sources or/and between the entities this knowledge represents (Laskey, Costa & Janssen, 2008; Jonquet et al., 2011).

• 4.

  Re-configuration of KSs to achieve a new configuration with new capabilities or competencies (Lin & Lo, 2010).

• 5.

  Knowledge exchange to improve capabilities or competencies through learning, interactions, discussions, and practices (Lin & Lo, 2010).

• 6.

  Involvement of knowledge from various sources in problem solving, which results in a new knowledge product (Smirnov et al., 2003).

The processes above can produce the following possible knowledge fusion results:

• •

  A new knowledge object created from data/information (the result of the process 1);

• •

  A new knowledge type or knowledge product (service, process, technology, etc.) (the result of the process 2);

• •

  New relations between knowledge objects (the result of the process 3);

• •

  New capabilities / competencies of a knowledge object (the result of the processes 4 and 5);

• •

  A new idea how to solve the problem (the result of the process 2); in the informatics terms this result corresponds to a new problem solving method;

• •

  A solution for the problem (the result of the process 6).