Information extraction and integration from heterogeneous, distributed, autonomous information sources - a federated ontology-driven query-centric approach

This paper motivates and describes the data integration component of INDUS (intelligent data understanding system) environment for data-driven information extraction and integration from heterogeneous, distributed, autonomous information sources. The design of INDUS is motivated by the requirements of applications such as scientific discovery, in which it is desirable for users to be able to access, flexibly interpret, and analyze data from diverse sources from different perspectives in different contexts. INDUS implements a federated, query-centric approach to data integration using user-specified ontologies.