The Center for Multisource Information Fusion (CMIF) is a research center based at the University at Buffalo and at a non-profit Western New York research center called CUBRC Inc.. Information fusion allows users to assess complex situations more accurately by combining effectively the core evidence in the massive, diverse and sometimes conflicting data received from multiple sources. CUBRC/UB's partners in the center are the Rochester Institute of Technology, which has expertise in image analysis and visualization, and Pennsylvania State University, which also has a long history in information fusion research focused on the human and cognitive aspects.
The development of the Internet in recent years has made it possible and useful to access many different information systems anywhere in the world to obtain information. While there is much research on the integration of heterogeneous information systems, most commercial systems stop short of the actual integration of available data. Data fusion is the process of fusing multiple records representing the same real-world object into a single, consistent, and clean representation.