Information Integration Research: Summary of NSF IDM Workshop Breakout Session
Alon Y. Halevy, Chen Li · 2004
Information integration systems provide users a uniform interface to a multitude of heterogeneous, independently developed data sources. They free the user from having to locate the data sources, interact with each one in isolation and manually combine data from multiple sources. The applications of information integration systems range from management of data in large enterprises, data sharing amongst government agencies and large scientific projects (e.g., biological research and astronomy), and integration of data sources on the World-Wide Web. In the past few years we have seen significant progress on many aspects of data integration, including languages for mediation between data sources, query processing techniques for data integration, and the construction of wrappers to data sources. In addition, recent commercial activities have produced tools that efficiently process queries across multiple data sources. To credit our community, it is noted that in many cases the commercial advances were carried out by members of the research community. The commercial experience points us in several important research directions, including managing semantic heterogeneity in a more scalable fashion, the use of domain knowledge in various parts of the system, and transforming these systems from query-only tools to more active data sharing scenarios.