Agent-based layered intelligent information integration system using ontology and metadata registry

Abstract

To share and exchange information, especially in the multidatabase environments, each component database must know the meanings and the representations of the information of other sources. And users who are searching integrated information on the Web have limitation to obtain schema information for the underlying component databases. To solve these problems, in this paper, we present an Agent-based Layered Intelligent Information Integration System (ALI3S) using metadata registry(MDR) and ontology.1 The purpose of the proposed architecture is to define an information integration model, which combines characteristics of both standard specification of MDRs and functionality of ontology for the concepts and relations. Adopting agent technology to the proposed model plays a key role to support the hierarchical and independent information integration architecture. © Springer-Verlag 2003.