A Stringy Generalization of the Kontsevich Integral

We introduce a "minimal" Kontsevich integral that generates the original Kontsevich integral while at the same time producing ribbons whose boundaries are the braids on which the minimal Kontsevich integral is evaluated. We generalize the definition of the Kontsevich integral to that of graphs in R^3 and study the behavior of such expressions as different graphs are brought together, thus leading to a 2-dimensional generalization of the Kontsevich integral.