Requirement Specification and Derivation of ECA Rules for Integrating Multiple Dissemination-Based Information Sources

The recent development of network technology has enabled us to access various information sources easily, and their integration has been studied intensively by the data engineering research community. Although technological advancement has made it possible to integrate existing heterogeneous information sources, we still have to deal with information sources of a new kind—dissemination-based information sources. They actively and autonomously deliver information from server sites to users. Integration of dissemination-based information sources is one of the popular research topics. We have been developing an information integration system in which we employ ECA rules to enable users to define new information delivery services integrating multiple existing dissemination-based information sources. However, it is not easy for users to directly specify ECA rules and to verify them. In this paper, we propose a scheme to specify new dissemination-based information delivery services using the framework of relational algebra. We discuss some important properties of the specification, and show how we can derive ECA rules to implement the services. key words: information dissemination, information integration, ECA rule, relational algebra