Information Integration (academic year 2012/2013)


This is one of the sections of the course Elective in Software and Services (Complementi di software e servizi per la società dell'informazione). The lectures of this section were held in February-May 2013.


For whom is this course. This 3 credits course is actually one of the sections of the course Complementi di software e servizi per la società dell'informazione for the students of the Laurea Magistrale in Ingegneria Informatica of the Sapienza Università di Roma, and the students of the Master in Computer Engineering (School of Engineering) of the Sapienza Università di Roma.
Prerequisites. A good knowledge of the fundamentals of Programming Structures, Programming Languages, Databases (SQL, relational data model, Entity-Relationship data model, conceptual and logical database design) and Database systems, as well as a basic knowledge of Mathematical Logic is required.
Course goals. Information integration is the problem of combining data residing at different sources, and providing the user with a unified view of these data. The problem of designing information integration systems is important in current real world applications, and is characterized by a number of issues that are interesting from both a theoretical and a practical point of view. In the last years, there has been a huge amount of research work on data integration, and a precise, clear picture of a systematic approach to such problem is now available. This section will present an overview of the research work carried out in the area of data integration, with emphasis on the theoretical results that are relevant for the development of information integration solutions. Special attention will be devoted to the following aspects: architectures for information integration, modeling an information integration application, ontology-based data access and integration, processing queries in information integration, data exchange, and reasoning on queries.