As a prerequisite to achieve the above goals, interoper ability problems at almost every level of abstraction
have to be solved: documents from physically distributed document archives must be retrieved, data from
databases with different schemata must be integrated,
and kinds of knowledge with different style (heuristic
experiences vs. hard legal regulations, individual ideas
vs. company-wide rules, single cases vs. general technical documentation, etc.), representation (texts, graphics, formal process descriptions, etc.) and content
(product vs. process knowledge, financial data vs. design goals, etc.) must be seen together