Towards Semistructured Data Integration

Abstract

With the recent popularity of the World Wide Web, an enormous amount of heterogeneous information is now available online. As a result, information about the same real-world object often spreads over different data sources, and may be partial and inconsistent. How to obtain information as complete as possible and detect inconsistency from these sources is thus a challenge. Previous work using a simple graph-based or tree-based data model to represent heterogeneous data coming from various sites fail to provide a proper foundation for the integration of data with partial and inconsistent information. In order to integrate such data, we need a powerful data model that is more expressive than the existing graph-based and tree-based ones to account for the existence of partial and inconsistent information from different data sources. In this chapter, we propose a novel data model for such data and study how to integrate such data spread in various sources and check consistency in the meantime. We propose a new operator called integration for this purpose and discuss its semantic properties.