Information Integration in Searchy: An Ontology and Web Services Based Approach

Organisations need from heterogeneous information systems to deal with the complexity of information management. The result is the creation of isolated views of the information and therefore an inherent difficulty to obtain a global view. Being able to provide such an unified and global view of the -likely heterogeneusinformation available in an organisation is a goal that provides added-value to the information systems. To address this problem several Enterprise Information Integration (EII) solutions have been proposed. In this paper, we present an EII solution named Searchy. Searchy is a agent-based platform which, through the utilization of heterogeneous semantic wrappers, integrates information from arbitrary sources and translates them into semantic terms. Its distributed nature and non intrusive operation enables it to operate in a B2B environments where several entities share their information systems.