un 2 00 1 Information Integration and Computational Logic

Information Integration is a young and exciting field with enormous research and commercial significance in the new world of the Information Society. It stands at the crossroad of Databases and Artificial Intelligence requiring novel techniques that bring together different methods from these fields. Information from disparate heterogeneous sources often with no apriori common schema needs to be synthesized in a flexible, transparent and intelligent way in order to respond to the demands of a query thus enabling a more informed decision by the user or application program. The field although relatively young has already found many practical applications particularly for integrating information over the World Wide Web. This paper gives a brief introduction of the field highlighting some of the main current and future research issues and application areas. It attempts to evaluate the current and potential role of Computational Logic in this and suggests some of the problems where logic-based techniques could be used.