Sabater described current research in the area, presenting some of the current research lines and the shortcomings of present approaches. He also outlined some of the topics in which information-fusion and aggregation operators can play a role. The conference papers were published in Springer Verlag's Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series (volume 3885). Further information on the series is available at mdai.cat. The next MDAI conference will be held August 16-18, 2007, in Kitakyushu, Japan.

Data integration is the problem of combining data residing at different autonomous, heterogeneous sources and providing the client with a unified, reconciled global view of the data. We resort to an expressive description logic, ALCQI, that fully captures classbased representation formalisms, and we show that query answering in data integration, as well as all other relevant reasoning tasks, is decidable. However, when we have to deal with large amounts of data, the high computational complexity in the size of the data makes the use of a fullfledged expressive description logic infeasible in practice. This leads us to consider DL-Lite, a specifically tailored restriction of ALCQI that ensures tractability of query answering in data integration while keeping enough expressive power to capture the most relevant features of class-based formalisms.

Semantic integration has been a long-standing challenge for the database community. It has received steady attention over the past two decades, and has now become a prominent area of database research. In this article, we first review database applications that require semantic integration and discuss the difficulties underlying the integration process. We then describe recent progress and identify open research issues. We focus in particular on schema matching, a topic that has received much attention in the database community, but also discuss data matching (for example, tuple deduplication) and open issues beyond the match discovery context (for example, reasoning with matches, match verification and repair, and reconciling inconsistent data values). For previous surveys of database research on semantic integration, see Rahm and Bernstein (2001); Ouksel and Seth (1999); and Batini, Lenzerini, and Navathe (1986).

Data integration is the problem of combining data residing at different autonomous, heterogeneous sources and providing the client with a unified, reconciled global view of the data. We discuss dataintegration systems, taking the abstract viewpoint that the global view is an ontology expressed in a class-based formalism. We resort to an expressive description logic, ALCQI, that fully captures classbased representation formalisms, and we show that query answering in data integration, as well as all other relevant reasoning tasks, is decidable. However, when we have to deal with large amounts of data, the high computational complexity in the size of the data makes the use of a fullfledged expressive description logic infeasible in practice. This leads us to consider DL-Lite, a specifically tailored restriction of ALCQI that ensures tractability of query answering in data integration while keeping enough expressive power to capture the most relevant features of class-based formalisms.

XML, web services, and the semantic web have opened the door for new and exciting informationintegration applications. Information sources on the web are controlled by different organizations or people, utilize different text formats, and have varying inconsistencies. Therefore, any system that integrates information from different data sources must identify common entities from these sources. Data from many data sources on the web does not contain enough information to link the records accurately using state-of-the-art record-linkage systems. However, it is possible to exploit secondary data sources on the web to improve the recordlinkage process. We present an approach to accurately and automatically match entities from various data sources by utilizing a state-of-the-art record-linkage system in conjunction with a data-integration system. The data-integration system is able to automatically determine which secondary sources need to be queried when linking records from various data sources. In turn, the record-linkage system is then able to utilize this additional information to improve the accuracy of the linkage between datasets.

This paper may look like a glossary of the fusion rules and we also introduce new ones presenting their formulas and examples: Conjunctive, Disjunctive, Exclusive Disjunctive, Mixed Conjunctive-Disjunctive rules, Conditional rule, Dempster's, Yager's, Smets' TBM rule, Dubois-Prade's, Dezert-Smarandache classical and hybrid rules, Murphy's average rule, Inagaki-Lefevre-Colot-Vannoorenberghe Unified Combination rules [and, as particular cases: Iganaki's parameterized rule, Weighting Average Operator, minC (M. Daniel), and newly Proportional Conflict Redistribution rules (Smarandache-Dezert) among which PCR5 is the most exact way of redistribution of the conflicting mass to non-empty sets following the path of the conjunctive rule], Zhang's Center Combination rule, Convolutive x-Averaging, Consensus Operator (Josang), Cautious Rule (Smets), ?-junctions rules (Smets), etc. and three new T-norm & T-conorm rules adjusted from fuzzy and neutrosophic sets to information fusion (Tchamova-Smarandache). Introducing the degree of union and degree of inclusion with respect to the cardinal of sets not with the fuzzy set point of view, besides that of intersection, many fusion rules can be improved. There are corner cases where each rule might have difficulties working or may not get an expected result.

This article presents the methodology that has been successfully used over the past seven years by an interdisciplinary team to create the International Committee for Documentation of the International Council of Museums (CIDOC) CONCEPTUAL REFERENCE MODEL (CRM), a high-level ontology to enable information integration for cultural heritage data and their correlation with library and archive information. The CIDOC CRM is now in the process to become an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard. The CIDOC CRM analyzes the common conceptualizations behind data and metadata structures to support data transformation, mediation, and merging. It is assumed that the presented methodology and the upper level of the ontology are applicable in a far wider domain.

Due to the large variety of CAD systems in the market, data exchange between different CAD systems is indispensable. Currently, data exchange standards such as STEP and IGES, etc. provide a unique approach for interfacing among different CAD platforms. Once the feature-based CAD model created in one CAD system is input into another via data exchange standards, many of the original features and the feature-related information may not exist any longer. The identification of the design features and their further decomposition into machining features for the downstream activities from a data exchanged part model is a bottleneck in integrated product and process design and development. In this paper, the feature panorama is succinctly articulated from the viewpoint of product design and manufacturing.

The Workshop on Intelligent Information Integration (III), organized in conjunction with the Sixteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, was held on 31 July 1999 in Stockholm, Sweden. Approximately 40 people participated, and nearly 20 papers were presented. This packed workshop schedule resulted from a large number of submissions that made it difficult to reserve discussion time without rejecting an unproportionately large number of papers. Participants included scientists and practitioners from industry and academia.

The Workshop on Intelligent Information Integration (III), organized in conjunction with the Sixteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, was held on 31 July 1999 in Stockholm, Sweden. Approximately 40 people participated, and nearly 20 papers were presented. This packed workshop schedule resulted from a large number of submissions that made it difficult to reserve discussion time without rejecting an unproportionately large number of papers. Participants included scientists and practitioners from industry and academia. Topics included query planning, applications of III, mediator architectures, and the use of ontologies for III.