The MOMIS approach to information integration

The web explosion, both at internet and intranet level, has transformed the electronic information system from single isolated node to an entry points into a worldwide network of information exchange and business transactions. Business and commerce has taken the opportunity of the new technologies to define the ecommerce activity. Therefore one of the main challenges for the designers of the e-commerce infrastructures is the information sharing, retrieving data located in different sources thus obtaining an integrated view to overcome any contradiction or redundancy. Virtual Catalogs synthesize this approach as they are conceived as instruments to dynamically retrieve information from multiple catalogs and present product data in a unified manner, without directly storing product data from catalogs. Customers, instead of having to interact with multiple heterogeneous catalogs, can interact in a uniform way with a virtual catalog. In this paper we propose a designer support tool, called SI-Designer, for information integration developed within the MOMIS project. The MOMIS project (Mediator environment for Multiple Information Sources) aims to integrate data from structured and semi-structured data sources.