On Intelligent Access to Heterogeneous Information

The process to provide integrated access to several, independent information sources is not easy, due to semantic heterogeneities which lead to semantic conflicts or contradictions. In this paper we present a discussion about the existence of contradictions, their importance and how they can be handled when the need of cooperation arises. 1 Introduction The growing need to access information from several information sources that have been designed independently and operate in a autonomous way has become an active research area nowadays. A possible solution to satisfy this need of cooperation is provide integrated access. This means that a user can formulate a single query and receives a single, consolidated answer. The collection of information sources (from now on called Component DataBases, CDBs), jointly with the software layer that manages the integrated access to data stored in CDBs, is known as an interoperable or Federated DataBase System (FDBS) [SL90]. The main characteristic..