The shift towards global networking brings with it many opportunities and challenges. In this paper, we discuss key technologies in achieving global semantic interoperability among heterogeneous information systems, including both traditional and web data sources. In particular, we focus on the...

Mappings in most federated databases are conceptualized and implemented as black-box transformations between source schemas and a federated schema. This approach does not allow specific mappings to be declared once and reused in other situations. We present an alternative approach, in which...

Virtually all of the existing approaches to ontology integration assume that each of the individual ontologies (and the integrated ontology) corresponds to a single set of semantics at a given time. We first claim that this single integrated view assumption is unnecessarily restrictive, and...

The prospect of combining information from diverse sources for superior decision making is plagued by the challenge of semantic heterogeneity, as data sources often adopt different conventions and interpretations when there is no coordination. An emerging solution in information integration is...

While there are efforts to establish a single international accounting standard, there are strong current and future needs to handle heterogeneous accounting methods and systems. We advocate a context-based approach to dealing with multiple accounting standards and equational ontological...

Cameleon# is a web data extraction and management tool that provides information aggregation with advanced capabilities that are useful for developing value-added applications and services for electronic business and electronic commerce. To illustrate its features, we use an airfare aggregation...

This paper describes the coupling of contexts and ontologies for semantic integration in the ECOIN semantic interoperability framework. Ontological terms in ECOIN correspond to multiple related meanings in different contexts. Each ontology includes a context model that describes how a generic...

The web is undoubtedly the largest and most diverse repository of data, but it was not designed to offer the capabilities of traditional data base management systems - which is unfortunate. In a true data federation, all types of data sources, such as relational databases and semi-structured...

Cameleon# is a web data extraction and management tool that provides information aggregation with advanced capabilities that are useful for developing value-added applications and services for electronic business and electronic commerce. To illustrate its features, we use an airfare aggregation...