Perspectives on imperfect information processing

It is argued that many applications of expert-system and decision-support-system technologies will require an appropriate blend of the features of each of these technologies. Such a system is termed a knowledge support system. One of its inherent characteristics is that the knowledge will come from multiple sources and perspectives and will be inherently uncertain, imprecise, incomplete, inconsistent, and otherwise imperfect. Major approaches for the representation of imperfect knowledge and their use in approximate reasoning algorithms for knowledge support systems are described.