Due to the increasing necessity and availability of information from different sources, information integration is becoming one of the most challenging issues in artificial intelligence and computer science. A successful methodology for information integration is based on Federated Databases (FDB). However, differently form databases a completely satisfactory formal treatment of FDBs is still missing. The goal of this paper is to fill this gap. Our basic intuition is that an FDB can be formalized by considering each database of the federation as a context. We argue that this perspective is a promising one, as some of the relevant problems in the area of information integration, such as semantic heterogeneity, can be successfully solved using contexts. We argue that this perspective is a promising one, as some of the relevant problems in the area of information integration, such as semantic heterogeneity, can be successfully solved using contexts. In the paper we provide a formal notion of FDB schema, and a context based semantics for such a schema, called Local Models Semantics for FDBs. We show by means of examples that Local Models Semantics overcomes the drwbacks of the previous approaches
Context Based Semantics for Information Integration
Serafini, Luciano;Ghidini, Chiara
2000-01-01
Abstract
Due to the increasing necessity and availability of information from different sources, information integration is becoming one of the most challenging issues in artificial intelligence and computer science. A successful methodology for information integration is based on Federated Databases (FDB). However, differently form databases a completely satisfactory formal treatment of FDBs is still missing. The goal of this paper is to fill this gap. Our basic intuition is that an FDB can be formalized by considering each database of the federation as a context. We argue that this perspective is a promising one, as some of the relevant problems in the area of information integration, such as semantic heterogeneity, can be successfully solved using contexts. We argue that this perspective is a promising one, as some of the relevant problems in the area of information integration, such as semantic heterogeneity, can be successfully solved using contexts. In the paper we provide a formal notion of FDB schema, and a context based semantics for such a schema, called Local Models Semantics for FDBs. We show by means of examples that Local Models Semantics overcomes the drwbacks of the previous approachesI documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
