Instances navigation for querying integrated data from web-sites

Research on data integration has provided a set of rich and well understood schema mediation languages and systems that provide a meta-data representation of the modeled real world, while, in general, they do not deal with data instances.Such meta-data are necessary for querying classes result of an integration process: the end user typically does not know the contents of such classes, he simply defines his queries on the basis of the names of classes and attributes.In this paper we introduce an approach enriching the description of selected attributes specifying as meta-data a list of the “relevant values” for such attributes. Furthermore relevant values may be hierarchically collected in a taxonomy. In this way, the user may exploit new meta-data in the interactive process of creating/refining a query. The same meta-data are also exploited by the system in the query rewriting/unfolding process in orderto filter the results showed to the user.We conducted an evaluation of the strategy in an e-business context within the EU-IST SEWASIE project. The evaluation proved the practicability of the approach for large value instances.