Information Integration through Reasoning on Meta-data

SILK is an Enterprise Information Integration (EII) system using knowledge representation and reasoning techniques to support both me-diation and integration of heterogeneous in-formation sources. The SILK system is built around a Model Warehouse which stores mod-els of single information sources, as well as unified models and their customised abstrac-tions. Models include constraints describing non-structural properties of the data sources. In the process of integration, the Model Ware-house is extended with mappings, which link the models, and spell out their relationship us-ing appropriate constraints. The paper describes several components of the SILK tool-set. The Rule Compiler is responsi-ble for transforming the constraints to a format suitable for mediation. The Comparator tool uses structural and textual comparison tech-niques to pinpoint related elements of the mod-els and to help in building the mappings. The Verifier component contains multiple reason-ing modules coordinated by a central scheduler, which help in the process of integration by de-tecting inconsistencies in the models and the mappings. The RDF-wrapper, a recent exten-sion of SILK, not only gives access to informa-tion available in RDF format, but also includes its own reasoning and consistency checking ca-pabilities. Finally, we also discuss a planned extension of the SILK, focusing on information integration in an agent-based mobile comput-ing environment