Abstract. To integrate information, data in different formats, from different, potentially overlapping sources, must be related and transformed to meet the users' needs. Ten years ago, Clio introduced nonprocedural schema mappings to describe the relationship between data in heterogeneous schemas. This enabled powerful tools for mapping discovery and integration code generation, greatly simplifying the integration process. However, further progress is needed. We see an opportunity to raise the abstraction further, to encompass both data- and schema-centric integration tasks and to isolate applications from the details of how the integration is accomplished. Holistic information integration supports iteration across the various integration tasks, leveraging information about both schema and data to improve the integrated result. Integration independence allows applications to be independent of how, when, and where information integration takes place, making materialization and the ...
Laura M. Haas, Martin Hentschel, Donald Kossmann,