NewsFusion Systems: Logic-based merging of heterogeneous news reports

A NewsFusion System is a logic-based system for merging heterogeneous structured news reports. Structured news reports are XML documents, where the text entries are restricted to individual words or simple phrases, such as names and domain-specific terminology, and numbers and units. We assume structured news reports do not require natural language processing. In previous papers [Hun00, Hun02b, Hun02a, HS03b, HS03a], we have presented a logic-based framework for merging structured news reports based on fusion rules. Fusion rules are a form of scripting language that define how structured news reports should be merged. The antecedent of a fusion rule is a call to investigate the information in the structured news reports and the background knowledge, and the consequent of a fusion rule is a formula specifying an action to be undertaken to form a merged report. It is expected that a set of fusion rules is defined for any given application. In this paper, we extend the syntax for fusion rules to support variables in queries to the background knowledge in Prolog, and we outline our implementation for executing fusion rules, together with a case study on merging weather reports.