Kraft: An Agent Architecture for Knowledge Fusion

Knowledge fusion refers to the process of locating and extracting knowledge from multiple, heterogeneous on-line sources, and transforming it so that the union of the knowledge can be applied in problem-solving. The KRAFT project has defined a generic agent-based architecture to support fusion of knowledge in the form of constraints expressed against an object data model. KRAFT employs three kinds of agent: facilitators locate appropriate on-line sources of knowledge; wrappers transform heterogeneous knowledge to a homogeneous constraint interchange format; mediators fuse the constraints together with associated data to form a dynamically-composed constraint satisfaction problem, which is then passed to an existing constraint solver engine to compute solutions. The paper presents the KRAFT architecture and the three kinds of agent, and includes a description of a demonstration KRAFT application in the domain of telecommunications service provision.