Advances in Data and Service Integration
Résumé
The problem of how to provide transparent access to heterogeneous information sources while maintaining their autonomy already appeared decades ago and has been addressed by data integration techniques. Those techniques enable the interaction between clients and data sources through a centralized access point, and uniform query interfaces that give users the illusion of querying a homogeneous system. However, they work under certain hypotheses, including moderately static scenarios, shared understanding of the domain of interest (in the form of a global schema or ontology), and a closed, or at least access-controlled, set of participating sources. All these hypotheses do not hold anymore in the current web comprising millions of autonomous peers, having no centralized control. In such an environment, research is needed to discover techniques for schema matching, mapping discovery, query processing, quality and trust management in such environments.