This research addresses incentive principles that drive information sharing and affect database value. Many real world centralization and standardization efforts have failed, typically because departments lacked incentives or needed greater local autonomy. While intangible factors such as...

We examine a knowledge representation architecture to support context interchange mediation. For autonomous receivers and sources sharing a common subject domain, the mediator's reasoning engine can devise query plans integrating multiple sources and resolving semantic heterogeneity. Receiver...

One of the appealing features of artificial intelligence is the ability to come up with the “right” answer automatically, faster and more reliably than humans. In many cases, the right answer is singular and unambiguous, such as 2 + 2 = 4 (3.9 or 4.1 are close, but not right.). But, as is...

To recover from media failures, a database is 'restored' from an earlier backup copy. A recovery log of transactions is used to roll forward from the backup version to the desired time (the current time). High availability requires that the backup copying be fast, and be in parallel with...

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...

To fight terrorism successfully, the quality of data must be considered to avoid garbage-in-garbage-out. Research has shown that data quality (DQ) goes beyond accuracy to include dimensions such as believability, timeliness, and accessibility. In collecting, processing, and analyzing a much...

We compare a family of algorithms for the automatic generation of taxonomies by adapting the Heymannalgorithm in various ways. The core algorithm determines the generality of terms and iteratively inserts them in a growing taxonomy. Variants of the algorithm are created by altering the way and...

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...

In this paper, we first identify semantic heterogeneities that, when not resolved, often cause serious data quality problems. We discuss the especially challenging problems of temporal and aggregational ontological heterogeneity, which concerns how complex entities and their relationships are...