Management of conflicting information in temporal environments

The increasing need for applications to utilise a community of information providers in their effort to answer an information request has been a lasting problem of research. In requesting a community of information providers two types of incompatibility may occur, namely structural and semantic. The former may be caused by differences in the attribute domain, format, units, and granularity (intentional inconsistencies). The latter can be caused by attribute value conflict, since similar defined attributes utilise different levels of a conceptual hierarchy (tree, lattice) in defining themselves (extensional inconsistencies).