Supporting Information Integration With Autonomous Agents (original) (raw)

Mobile Agents for Information Integration

2001

The large amount of information that is spread over the Internet is an important resource for all people but also introduces some issues that must be faced. The dynamism and the uncertainty of the Internet, along with the heterogeneity of the sources of information are the two main challanges for the today's technologies. This paper proposes an approach based on mobile agents integrated in an information integration infrastructure. Mobile agents can significantly improve the design and the development of Internet applications thanks to their characteristics of autonomy and adaptability to open and distributed environments, such as the Internet. MOMIS (Mediator envirOnment for Multiple Information Sources) is an infrastructure for semi-automatic information integration that deals with the integration and query of multiple, heterogeneous information sources (relational, object, XML and semi-structured sources). The aim of this paper is to show the advantage of the introduction in the MOMIS infrastructure of intelligent and mobile software agents for the autonomous management and coordination of the integration and query processes over heterogeneous data sources.

Momis: Exploiting Agents to Support Information Integration

International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems, 2002

Information overloading introduced by the large amount of data that is spread over the Internet must be faced in an appropriate way. The dynamism and the uncertainty of the Internet, along with the heterogeneity of the sources of information are the two main challenges for the today's technologies related to information management. In the area of information integration, this paper proposes an approach based on mobile software agents integrated in the MOMIS (Mediator envirOnment for Multiple Information Sources) infrastructure, which enables semi-automatic information integration to deal with the integration and query of multiple, heterogeneous information sources (relational, object, XML and semi-structured sources). The exploitation of mobile agents in MOMIS can significantly increase the flexibility of the system. In fact, their characteristics of autonomy and adaptability well suit distributed and open environments, such as the Internet. The aim of this paper is to show the advantages of the introduction in the MOMIS infrastructure of intelligent and mobile software agents for the autonomous management and coordination of integration and query processing over heterogeneous data sources.

MIKS : An Agent Framework Supporting Information Access and Integration

2003

Providing an integrated access to multiple heterogeneous sources is a challenging issue in global information systems for cooperation and interoperability. In the past, companies have equipped themselves with data storing systems building up informative systems containing data that are related one another, but which are often redundant, not homogeneous and not always semantically consistent. Moreover, to meet the requirements of global, Internet-based information systems, it is important that the tools developed for supporting these activities are semi-automatic and scalable as much as possible. To face the issues related to scalability in the large-scale, in this paper we propose the exploitation of mobile agents in the information integration area, and, in particular, their integration in the MOMIS infrastructure. MOMIS (Mediator EnvirOnment for Multiple Information Sources) is a system that has been conceived as a pool of tools to provide an integrated access to heterogeneous information stored in traditional databases (for example relational, object oriented databases) or in file systems, as well as in semi-structured data sources (XML-file). This proposal has been implemented within the MIKS (Mediator agent for Integration of Knowledge Sources) system and it is completely described in this paper.

Database Integration using Mobile Agents

The classic problem of information integration has been addressed for a long time. The Semantic Web project is aiming to define an infrastructure that enables machine understanding. This is a vision that tackles the problem of semantic heterogeneity by using ontologies for information sharing. Agents have an important role in this infrastructure. In this paper we present a new solution, known as DIA (Data Integration using Agents), for semantic integration using mobile agents and ontologies.

DIA: DATA INTEGRATION USING AGENTS

The classic problem of information integration has been addressed for a long time. The Semantic Web project is aiming to define an infrastructure that enables machine understanding. This is a vision that tackles the problem of semantic heterogeneity by using ontologies for information sharing. Agents have an important role in this infrastructure. In this paper we present a new solution, known as DIA (Data Integration using Agents), for semantic integration using mobile agents and ontologies.

Using Agents for Generation and Maintenance of Mediators in a Data Integration System on the Web

2001

In this paper we present a system for data integration on the web, where an XML-based mediator plays a key role providing a homogeneous view of different data sources. One novelty of our approach is that we also propose solutions for the problems of generation and maintenance of mediators. Observe that, in dynamic environments, such as the Web, individual data sources may change not only their data but also their schemas. As a result, whenever a local schema changes, the mediator needs to be updated to reflect the modifications. The system uses agents to support mediator generation and maintenance. We specify a set of tasks that must be performed by the agents in order to support these two tasks. In our approach, we use correspondence assertions for specifying the semantics of XML-based mediators. We also discuss how this high-level specification of the mediator can be used to automate the generation and maintenance of mediators.

An agent framework for supporting the MIKS integration process

2002

Providing an integrated access to multiple heterogeneous sources is a challenging issue in global information systems for cooperation and interoperability. In the past, companies have equipped themselves with data storing systems building up informative systems containing data that are related one another, but which are often redundant, not homogeneous and not always semantically consistent. Moreover, to meet the requirements of global, Internet-based information systems, it is important that the tools developed for supporting these activities are semi-automatic and scalable as much as possible.