Information Integration has the goal of providing an integrated and coherent view of data stored in multiple, possibly inhomogeneous information sources. There are two basic approaches to the information integration problem, called procedural and declarative. In the procedural approach, data are integrated in an ad-hoc manner with respect to a set of predefined information needs. In the declarative approach, the goal is to model the data at the sources by means of a suitable language, to construct a unified representation, and to refer to such a representation when querying the information system.
The first part of the talk will present an architecture for Information Integration based on the declarative approach, which allows to explicitly model data and information needs - at the conceptual, logical, physical, and meta levels. This architecture has been first proposed within the 'Foundations of Data Warehouse Quality' (DWQ) long-term research project. In the second part of the talk the TAMBIS system ('Transparent Access to Multiple Biological Information Sources'), will be introduced, which is based on an ontology of biological and bioinformatic terms.
Enrico Franconi is Associate Professor at the Department of Computer
Science of the University of Manchester, the Principal Investigator in the European ESPRIT-4 Long Term Research project 'Foundations of Data
Warehouse Quality' (DWQ ESPRIT-LTR-22469), and a co-investigator in the UK EPSRC project 'Flexible source integration in distributed knowledge-based query processing for bioinformatic information sources' (TAMBIS-III EPSRC GR/M76607).
