The prototype system implemented in this research indeed enhances the interoperability between the heterogeneous information sources. Through the XQuery interface of the prototype system, users can get the needed and integrated information from different heterogeneous information sources without additional considerations of the complexity of accessing each information source. The contradictory nature of the requested information is reduced through the
information integration process. Interoperability enhancement is our emphatic point.
4.2. Future Research Directions
The prototype for HII with schema and ontology assisted implemented in this research are trying to prove the information integration method we provide and get a satisfactory result. Due to time and resource restrictions, this research still has a number of areas to improve in the future.
For example, thoroughly design the evolution process of the information integration method. The automatic or semi-automatic correspondence and conflict identification of the creation process of the global schema may need further study.
In addition, our method is best used in a stable environment, which seems applicable for e-businesses and Intranets. However, the trend toward globalization stresses collaboration between enterprises. The need for information exchange makes the issue of cross-enterprise HII more and more important. So extending the scope of the heterogeneous information integration from the e-business to e-commerce or even collaborative-commerce could be an interesting research direction for further study in the future.
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Internet References TSIMMIS: http://www-db.stanford.edu/tsimmis/tsimmis.html DISCO: http://www-caravel.inria.fr/Eprototype_Disco.html Garlic: http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/garlic/
MIX: http://www.npaci.edu/DICE/mix-system.html
Agora: http://www-rocq.inria.fr/~manolesc/AGORA/index.html OBSERVER: http://sol1.cps.unizar.es:5080/OBSERVER/
ONTOBROKER: http://ontobroker.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/index_ob.html HERA: http://wwwis.win.tue.nl/~hera/
W3C: http://www.w3.org
XQuery: http://www.w3.org/XML/Query
XML Schema: http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema RDF: http://www.w3.org/RDF/
OWL: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/WebOnt/
Jena: http://jena.sourceforge.net/
Protégé: http://protege.stanford.edu
APA Style Essentials: http://www.vanguard.edu/faculty/ddegelman/index.cfm?doc_id=796#title Other :http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/kst/what-is-an-ontology.html