  The management and combination of uncertain, imprecise, fuzzy and even
paradoxical or high conflicting sources of information has always been, and
still remains today, of primal importance for the development of reliable
modern information systems involving artificial reasoning. In this
introduction, we present a survey of our recent theory of plausible and
paradoxical reasoning, known as Dezert-Smarandache Theory (DSmT), developed for
dealing with imprecise, uncertain and conflicting sources of information. We
focus our presentation on the foundations of DSmT and on its most important
rules of combination, rather than on browsing specific applications of DSmT
available in literature. Several simple examples are given throughout this
presentation to show the efficiency and the generality of this new approach.
