Merging uncertain information with semantic heterogeneity in XML

Semistructured information can be merged in a logic-based framework [6, 7]. This framework has been extended to deal with uncertainty, in the form of probability values, degrees of beliefs, or necessity measures, associated with leaves (i.e. textentries) in the XML documents [3]. In this paper we further extend this approach to modelling and merging uncertain information that is defined at different levels of granularity of XML textentries, and to modelling and reasoning with XML documents that contain semantically heterogeneous uncertain information on more complex elements in XML subtrees. We present the formal definitions for modelling, propagating and merging semantically heterogeneous uncertain information and explain how they can be handled using logic-based fusion techniques. Anthony Hunter received a B.Sc. (1984) from the University of Bristol and an M.Sc. (1987) and Ph.D. (1992) from Imperial College, London. He is currently a reader in the Department of Computer Science at University College London. His main research interests are: Knowledge representation and reasoning, Analysing inconsistency, Argumentation, Default reasoning and Knowledge Fusion. Weiru Liu is a senior lecturer at the School of Computer Science, Queen's University Belfast. She received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from Jilin University, P.R China, and her Ph.D. degree in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. Her main research interests include reasoning under uncertainty, knowledge representation and reasoning, uncertain knowledge and information fusion, and knowledge discovery in databases. She has published over 50 journal and conference papers in these areas.