Maintaining a Unified View Over Structured Data

Francois Scharffe
Digital Enterprise Research Institute, University of Innsbruck

Abstract
Integrating various data sources is a major problem in knowledge management. Integration systems proposed in the last two decades as a solution start showing some limitations for various reasons. First the environment scaled from a few data sources in the same location to an unknow number of possible data sources on the Web. Second the sources to be integrated may change quickly over time. We propose in this article a method allowing for the dynamic integration of data sources on the web. Based on a network of schemas (database schemas, ontologies) related via mappings our algorithm generates a global view over a set of resources. Our approach presents the advantage to minimize the necessary human intervention in order to integrate sources.