There is pressing need for effectively integrating information from an ever increasing number of available sources both on the web and in other existing systems. A key difficulty of achieving this goal comes from the pervasive heterogeneities in all levels of information systems. Existing and...

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...

One of the challenges of dealing with multiple contexts is the significant effort required to provide all necessary lifting rules so that statements in one context can be viewed and understood in other contexts. In this paper, we introduce the notion of structured contexts, where a lightweight...

Technological advances such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) have increased the feasibility and importance of effectively integrating information from an ever widening number of systems within and across enterprises. A key difficulty of achieving this goal comes from the pervasive...

The change in meaning of data over time poses significant challenges for the use of that data. These challenges exist in the use of an individual data source and are further compounded with the integration of multiple sources. In this paper, we identify three types of temporal semantic...

Sell Globally and Shop Globally have been seen as a potential benefit of web-enabled electronic business. One important step toward realizing this benefit is to know how things are selling in various parts of the world. A global price comparison service would address this need. But there have...