Integration of results on data acquisition
and transformation

Selected research results from the area of data source acquisition and transformation have been integrated. Research on multi- and federated database systems has made available a number of techniques and systems for accessing heterogeneous data at a homogenized level. Any advanced information integration system which should be used in a wider context must be capable of incorporating sources that provide data in different formats, such as relational data, object-oriented data, or semi-structured data. One of the INFOMIX objectives is to make use of selected existing results and techniques in the area of heterogeneous data acquisition and transformation, and to integrate them into the architecture of an advanced information integration system. Besides retrieval based methods, also the use of techniques for extracting information which is not explicitly, in particular those developed by TU-Wien, should be considered. As a result, a much more powerful system for combining heterogeneous data has been provided.