Semantic Integration Technonolgies Survey

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Description/Abstract

The \underline{University of Southampton} and \underline{Hewlett Packard Laboratories at Bristol} are collaborating in a joint project, CROSI, to investigate semantic integration. \textbf{CROSI}, which stands for Capturing, Representing, and Operationalising Semantic Integration, aims to advance the state-of-the-art for semantic integration technologies. Semantic integration has become a much debated topic in today's research agenda, especially with the advent of the Semantic Web. Its roots, however, go long time back in history of computer science with early attempts to resolve the problem found in the database literature of the eighties. It is concerned with the use of explicit semantic descriptions to facilitate information and systems integration. Due to the widespread importance of integration, many disparate communities have tackled this problem. They have developed a wide variety of overlapping but complementary technologies and approaches. In this deliverable we present a comprehensive survey of the technological landscape in this area. As it is broadly defined and practiced by a number of diverse communities we aim to highlight this diversity. We complement and enhance previously published surveys in this area by focussing on convergence issues and techniques that can be carried over to similar problems. We also aim to identify concrete semantic integration cases which help us to inform a practical set of semantic integration criteria. These could be used to define desiderata for future semantic integration systems.