INFOMIX: Knowledge-Based Information Integration
(IST project 2001-33570 INFOMIX) To the official Website.
Contents
Project participants
- Universita della Calabria:
- Nicola Leone, Pasquale Rullo.
- Institut für Informationssysteme, TU Wien:
- KBS: Thomas Eiter, Wolfgang Faber, Michael Fink, Hans Tompits;
- DBAI: Robert Baumgartner, Georg Gottlob, Marcus Herzog , Gerald Pfeifer.
- Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Universita "La Sapienza" - Roma:
- Maurizio Lenzerini, Daniele Nardi, Riccardo Rosati.
- Rodan Systems S.A., Poland.
- Nicola Leone, Pasquale Rullo.
Goals and objectives
The main goal of the INFOMIX project is to provide a set of techniques and associated tools for powerful information integration by using advanced reasoning capabilities. It aims at developing a theory, comprising a comprehensive information model and information integration algorithms, and a prototype implementation of a knowledge-based system for advanced information integration, by using computational logic and integrating research results on data acquisition and transformation.
The objectives of the project are detailed as follows:
- Comprehensive Infromation Model: A comprehensive information model has to be provided, which incorporates static and dynamic aspects of information integration, and supports advanced "human-like" reasoning, based on a rich semantics.
- Information Integraion Algorithms: A host of efficient algorithms for information integration must be provided, which can be applied to homogenized data from heterogeneous data sources.
- Usage of Computational Logic: Exploit advanced methodologies and techniques from computational logic as a toolbox for information integration.
- Integration of Results on Data Acquisition and Transformation: Selected research results from the area of data source acquisition and transformation schould be integrated.
- Prototype System: Definition and implementation of a component-based integration system prototype, and providing an infrastructure by using software agent technology.
Motivation and background
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.
Information integration is one of the core problems in distributed databases, cooperative information systems, and data warehousing, which are key areas in the software development industry, and has emerged as a crucial issue in many organizations, due to the increasing number of different information sources available both inside and outside the organization. And, obviously, inter-organization information exchange is rapidly growing as a byproduct of the expansion of the Internet and the World Wide Web.
Although information integration was the subject of several research projects, in practice, an information integration system is usually realized in a pragmatic way. This is partially due to the fact that information integration is a highly complex problem, comprising aspects ranging from modeling to query processing, query optimization, inconsistency handling etc. Both a comprehensive, formal design methodology for information integration, and a set of coherent tools for the design and use of an information integration system, are missing to date.
Our vision is that future systems for information integration will have powerful capabilities through which information integration can be done efficiently at a human level of competence, and even beyond. Furthermore, these systems will provide high flexibility through the possibility of selecting or defining different integration strategies by the user, the use of domain knowledge and context knowledge from the application, and by utilizing varying reasoning capabilities in the integration process.