Inconsistency Handling in Collaborative Knowledge Management

One of the challenges of knowledge management is handling inconsistency. Traditionally, it was often perceived as indication of invalid data or behavior and as such should be avoided or eliminated. However, there are also numerous situations where inconsistency is a natural phenomena or carry useful information. In order to decide how to manage inconsistent knowledge, it is thus important to recognize its origin, aspect and influence on the behavior of the system. In this paper, we analyze a case of collaborative knowledge management with hybrid knowledge representation. This serves as a starting point for a discussion about various types of inconsistencies and approaches to handle it. We analyze sources, interpretation and possible approaches to identified types of inconsistencies. We discuss practical use cases to illustrate selected approaches.