On Requirements for Federated Data Integration as a Compilation Process

Abstract. Data integration problems are commonly viewed as inter-operability issues, where the burden of reaching a common ground for exchanging data is distributed across the peers involved in the process. While apparently an effective approach towards standardization and in-teroperability, it poses a constraint to data providers who, for a vari-ety of reasons, require backwards compatibility with proprietary or non-standard mechanisms. Publishing a holistic data API is one such use case, where a single peer performs most of the integration work in a many-to-one scenario. Incidentally, this is also the base setting of soft-ware compilers, whose operational model is comprised of phases that perform analysis, linkage and assembly of source code and generation of intermediate code. There are several analogies with a data integration process, more so with data that live in the Semantic Web, but what re-quirements would a data provider need to satisfy, for an integrator to be able to query and transform its data effectively, with no further enforce-ments on the provider? With this paper, we inquire into what practices and essential prerequisites could turn this intuition into a concrete and exploitable vision, within Linked Data and beyond