Research on Dynamic Integration of Heterogeneous Information Sources in Network Environments

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Due to the recent advances of computer and network technology, integration of heterogeneous information sources has become a very important researchtopic. In this research, we have investigated a number of issues for dynamic integration of the information sources in distributed environments. The first issue is on a data model used for data integration. The second issue is on data processing in information integration systems based on the mediator/wrapper architecture. The third issue is on user interface and on agent-based query processing. The main research results are summarized as follows.1. We developed a data model named WebNR/SD. It focuses on dynamic integration of relational databases, XML document repositories, and WWW. In WebNR/SD, data is represented as nested relations possibly containing structured document values. The WebNR/SD algebra enables dynamic conversion between structured documents and nested relations.2. We designed an information integration system based on the … More mediator/wrapper architecture. We actually implemented a prototype system named InfoWeaver. It achieves integration of data in Oracle, OpenText, XML WWW pages, and so on.3. In WebNR/SD, users can query WWW pages residing on distant WWW servers. We developed an agent-based WWW query processing scheme, and verified its effectiveness on the reduction of page transfer cost through experiments.4. We developed a visual user interface which help novice users specify data integration requests, and implemented it on InfoWeaver.5. We developed a scheme to attain integration of video databases in our environment. SMIL is utilized to specify multimedia integration.6. We developed interactive WWW structure authoring facility. It supports publishing data integration results as multimedia WWW pages.7. Dissemination-based information delivery service has become important. We extended InfoWeaver to have dissemination-based features : integration of dissemination-based information sources and dissemination-based delivery of the integration results.8. We developed an extensible query language for XML databases.9. We studied issues related with data processing other than querying in mediation systems. Less