This is the first book to offer a cohesive treatment of the research problems in collaborative knowledge acquisition from semantically disparate information sources & approaches for addressing the problems.

The book discusses the fundamental advances in this area covering a broad range & complexity of research issues. The approach taken incorporates a synergistic synthesis of insights, algorithms & results drawn from multiple areas including:
. Artificial Intelligence - especially machine learning, data mining, knowledge representation & inference, intelligent agents & multi-agent systems;
. Information Systems - especially databases, information integration, semantic web; &
. Distributed computing & software engineering (e.g. service-oriented computing).

Written for researchers & graduate students as well as advanced practitioners in data mining, semantic technologies, AI, Information integration, the semantic web, & information systems, this accessible self-contained survey will be a valuable reference tool.