Information Integration through Reasoning on Meta-data

SILK is an Enterprise Information Integration (EII) system using knowledge representation and reasoning techniques to support both me- diation and integration of heterogeneous in- formation sources. The SILK system is built around a Model Warehouse which stores mod- els of single information sources, as well as unified models and their customised abstrac- tions. Models include constraints describing non-structural properties of the data sources. In the process of integration, the Model Ware- house is extended with mappings, which link the models, and spell out their relationship us- ing appropriate constraints. The paper describes several components of the SILK tool-set. The Rule Compiler is responsi- ble for transforming the constraints to a format suitable for mediation. The Comparator tool uses structural and textual comparison tech- niques to pinpoint related elements of the mod- els and to help in building the mappings. The Verifier component contains multiple reason- ing modules coordinated by a central scheduler, which help in the process of integration by de- tecting inconsistencies in the models and the mappings. The RDF-wrapper, a recent exten- sion of SILK, not only gives access to informa- tion available in RDF format, but also includes its own reasoning and consistency checking ca- pabilities. Finally, we also discuss a planned extension of the SILK, focusing on information integration in an agent-based mobile comput- ing environment.