Digital Library Services Supporting Information Integration over the Web*

Abstract. Our research and development activities in digital libraries raised relevant features in supporting Web information integration. Underlain by an in house multi-agent based architecture, the main achievements so far have been prototyped as services: (a) various semantic interoperability niches, by the use of inter-ontological relationships built onto iscapes (a means of specifying information requests using embedded context sensitive information); (b) integrated access to information, by automating metabase (a database of metadata) creation; (c) a framework for creating iscapes and metadata modeling; and (d) information processing, by query planning and cost modeling of Web sources. A real-world application scenario illustrates how geographical and environmental Web-based information systems can benefit from appropriating these facilities