Knowledge ‘decay’ is a measure of the degradation of knowledge integrity. In a unified knowledge representation, data, information and knowledge are all represented in a single formalism as “items”. A unified knowledge representation is extended here to include two measures of knowledge integrity. A rule of inference is defined on the unified knowledge representation that preserves the validity of these two measures. This rule of inference is used to define a normalised knowledge base. The use of a unified knowledge representation and the application of knowledge base normalisation simplifies the estimation of knowledge decay.
John K. Debenham