CALL FOR PAPERS
International Workshop
Intelligent Information Integration
9. - 12. September 1997
during the
21st German Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI-97)
Freiburg, Germany
1. Description
Within the last years, the integration of heterogeneous sources of
information has become an extremely important field of
investigation. This is demonstrated by the recent US programs dealing
with this topic (see for example "Intelligent Information Integration
(I3)" by DARPA).
The activities in this field aim at a logical joining of existing
information systems ("legacy systems"). A feasible manner of
integration allows the transparent access to different heterogeneous
sources of information (i.e. federative databases, data
warehouse). Another approach concentrates on the direct information
exchange between systems (i.e standards like STEP, KIF, SUM; data
transformators). Trying to make use of the information of previous
systems regarding the new development is connected with this last
approach which applies, above all, to the new development of
knowledge-based systems (i.e. knowledge sharing and reuse).
The actual problems of these integration approaches depend not only on
the technical level dealing with the physical communication between
different host families and systems (e.g. via Intranet and Internet),
but also on the semantic level: information has to be interpreted,
i.e. understood, by the existing applications. Thus, apart from the
information itself the meaning of the information has to be defined
and, if possible, to be represented.
Particularly on this semantic level artificial intelligence has
developed formalisms and techniques which model explicitly and
declaratively the semantic contents of information and interpret these
through appropriate inference mechanism. The examples of integration
approaches below are based on these techniques:
o terminological systems for the modelling of different types of
documents and their sources (project KIT-MIHMA)
o transformation rules between ontologies (project IMCOD)
o description of mediators via rule-like formalisms (project TSIMMIS)
o rules for the integration of database schemes (project HDB)
The problem of information integration is also investigated in fields
of research other than artificial intelligence. For examle in
o Federative Databases
Modern enterprises often employ different databases for storing
different information. A transparent access to all data of a company
requires i.e. the integration of database patterns. A special problem
in this context presents the integration of different database
paradigms (e.g. the integration of object-oriented and relational
databases).
o Data-Warehouse
The application of data warehouse aims roughly at the integration
of all available data sources of a company. As opposed to federative
databases non-relationally stored data will be taken into
consideration and data sources will be employed for the analysis
mainly in order to support decision finding.
o Workflow
Workflow systems integrate application systems in process
chains. Processes determine among others the information flow among
the heterogeneous application systems. For this, the data of a system
have to be transferred into the semantically equivalent data format of
a different system.
1.1. Topics of the Workshop
This workshop invites users, developers and researchers in the
research fields of Artificial Intelligence, Databases, Data-Warehouse,
and Workflow who are engaged in problems regarding the integration of
heterogeneous information sources. We appreciate contributions which
e.g.
o present integration approaches or
o examine integration approaches with respect to the semantics of
information.
The following questions are of special interest but not limited to:
o Which integration approaches are being followed in principle? e.g.
- What is the aim of the integration approach?
- Which is the level where the integration takes place?
(e.g. syntactical level, semantic level, etc.)
- Is there an integration of the existing information sources or
rather a new construction of a heterogeneous system?
- Which assumptions are made?
- What are the problems of the integration approach?
o What part plays the significance of the information with respect to
the integration? e.g.
- What is meant by "semantic of information"?
- Does it make sense or is it important to take the meaning of
information into consideration?
- Are the semantics of information being used explicitly in an
integration approach?
o Is there any modelling and representation of the meaning of
information? e.g.
- Which descriptional language is employed?
(e.g. SQL database schemes)
- Does the descriptional language take the meaning of information
into consideration?
- How may the meaning of information be modelled explicitly?
- Which meta information concerning the information is necessary?
(e.g. information structure, information source, integrity
constraints)
o How may an explicitly modelled semantics be used for the
integration? e.g.
- How will information of equal significance but different
structure or format be identified?
- How will semantically equivalent but structurally different
information be transformed?
2. Submissions
General approaches to problem solving and/or aims for further research
activities will be prefered to specialized technical
contributions. Also, short contributions regarding personal research
interest are welcome in this context.
Papers can be submitted as
- long paper (max. 12 pages),
- short paper (max. 5 pages) or
- research interests (max. 3 pages).
As text formats LaTex or Microsoft Word will be prefered. Papers
should be sent electronically not later than 15. May 1997 to
Holger Wache <wache@tzi.uni-bremen.de>
Authors that cannot submit Papers electronically should please send 5
hardcopies to the following address:
Holger Wache
Bereich Intelligente Systeme
Technologie-Zentrum Informatik (TZI) - FB3
Universit"at Bremen
Postfach 330440
D-28334 Bremen
GERMANY
We propose to publish the contributions in an English Proceedings as a
report of the Technolgie-Zentrum Informatik (TZI) and via WWW.
3. Timetable
Submission deadline 15. May 1997
Notification of acceptance 15. June 1997
Final papers due 1. July 1997
4. Program Committee
Holger Wache (TZI, Universit"at Bremen, Germany),
Franz Baader (Theoretische Informatik, RWTH Aachen, Germany),
Dieter Fensel (AIFB, Universit"at Karlsruhe, Germany),
Christoph Klauck (TZI, Universit"at Bremen, Germany),
Frank Leymann (German Software Development Laboratory, IBM Deutschland
GmbH, Germany),
Markus Tresch (Institute of Information Systems, ETH Z"urich, Switzerland)
5. Further Information
Holger Wache
Bereich Intelligente Systeme
Technologie-Zentrum Informatik (TZI) - FB3
Universit"at Bremen
Postfach 330440
D-28334 Bremen
Telefon: ++49 (0)241 218-2234
Fax: ++49 (0)241 218-7196
email: wache@informatik.uni-bremen.de
www: http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~wache/i3-ki97
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