Efficient Data Integration: Automation, Collaboration, and Relaxation

The rapid growth of distributed data has fueled significant interest in building data integration systems. However, developing these systems today still requires an enormous amount of labor from system builders. Several nontrivial tasks must be performed, such as wrapper construction and mapping between schemas. Then, in dynamic environments such as the Web, sources often undergo changes that break the system, requiring the builder to continually invest maintenance effort. This has resulted in very high cost of ownership for integration systems, and severely limited their deployment in practice.