Information Integration on the World Wide Web

Heiner Stuckenschmidt, Ubbo Visser, Holger Wache

(4 hours)


The overall goal of the tutorial is to discuss the relation between existing
research in the area of intelligent information integration and new
requirements and technologies that arise from the area of semantic web
research. We would like to emphasize the importance of information
integration on the World Wide Web in the context of providing intelligent
access to heterogeneous and distributed information sources and intelligent
services. We will provide an overview of existing solutions to the problem
of information integration and extract common features in terms of
architecture and technologies use in order to give potential attendees an
impression of how successful approaches look like. Furthermore, we would
like to stress how these common features relate to semantic web architecture
and technology, revealing similarities and differences. Based on this
comparison we discuss prospects and challenges for semantic web research in
order to stimulate research in this area.


Table of Contents

Part I: Introduction
- Motivation
- Classification of Problems

Part II: The Role of Ontologies
- Lexical Semantics
- Formal Ontologies
- Logic-Based Integration

Part III: Survey of Existing Approaches
- Use of Ontologies
- Ontology Representation
- Use of Mappings
- Engineering Support

Part IV: System Demonstrations
- Ontobroker
- OBSERVER
- BUSTER

Part V: Future Directions
- Peer-to-peer Systems
- Query Relaxation and Approximation
- Beyond Inheritance
- Benchmarking

Hands-On Activites

The only practical part is the system demponstration that will be prepared
by the speakers


Supporting Material To Be Provided

Printouts of the slides will be provided to attendees. Further, a reader
with related papers will be prepared and made available online.


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