Project Objectives

Description of work
Information integration is the task of providing a uniform interface to various pre-existing data sources, so as to enable users to focus on specifying what they want, rather than thinking of how to obtain the answer. As a result, an information integration system frees the users from the tasks of finding the relevant data sources, interacting with each source in isolation, and selecting, cleaning, and combining data from multiple sources. The project aims at providing a solid theory and innovative methodologies for future flexible information integration systems. In particular, advanced reasoning capabilities by means of computational logic, handling of semi-structured data, declarative user interaction, possibilities to deal with incomplete and inconsistent data sources, extendibility and scalability have been tackled and resolved in this project. In addition, a prototype system has been developed in order to assess the validity and usability of our approach. We point out that especially the scalability desideratum was challenging since comparable techniques were insufficient in this respect, so it was unclear whether this requirement can be met. However, upon success the benefits will be ample: Not only will companies, organizations, and other enterprises be able to integrate their internal data at high level of competence and in an efficient manner; also inter-organizational, and large scale distributed information systems will become feasible.