Information Integration: Conceptual Modeling and Reasoning Support

Information Integration is one of the core problems in cooperative information systems. We argue that two critical factors for the design and maintenance of applications requiring Information Integration are conceptual modeling of the domain, and reasoning support over the conceptual representation. In particular, we present a general architecture for Information Integration that explicitly includes a conceptual representation of the application. We illustrate how the architecture can express several integration settings and existing systems. We provide various arguments in favor of the conceptual level in the architecture and of automated reasoning over the conceptual representation. Finally, we present a specific proposal of an integration system which realizes the general architecture and is equipped with decidable reasoning procedures