There is pressing need for effectively integrating information from an ever increasing number of available sources both on the web and in other existing systems. A key difficulty of achieving this goal comes from the pervasive heterogeneities in all levels of information systems. Existing and...

Sell Globally and Shop Globally have been seen as a potential benefit of web-enabled electronic business. One important step toward realizing this benefit is to know how things are selling in various parts of the world. A global price comparison service would address this need. But there have...

As an open standard for electronic communication of business and financial data, XBRL has the potential of improving the efficiency of the business data supply chain. A number of jurisdictions have developed different XBRL taxonomies as their data standards. Semantic heterogeneity exists in...

There are many different kinds of ontologies used for different purposes in modern computing. Lightweight ontologies are easy to create, but difficult to deploy; formal ontolgies are relatively easy to deploy, but difficult to create. This paper presents an approach that combines the strengths...

The convergence of three distinct but interconnected trends - unrelenting globalization, growing worldwide electronic connectivity, and increasing knowledge intensity of economic activity - is creating powerful new opportunities and challenges for global politics. This rapidly changing...

With the increasing use of the Internet, many of us feel strongly about the free and unfettered exchange and use of information. But the actual situation is not that simple. After the European Union adopted the Database Directive to provide legal protection for non-copyrightable database...

In its Preface, The 9/11 Commission Report states: We learned that the institutions charted with protecting ... national security did not understand how grave this threat can be, and did not adjust their policies, plans, and practices to deter or defeat it (2004: xvi). Given current realities...

The underlying assumptions for interpreting the meaning of data often change over time, which further complicates the problem of semantic heterogeneities among autonomous data sources. As an extension to the Context Interchange (COIN) framework, this paper introduces the notion of temporal...

Changes of semantics in data sources further complicate the semantic heterogeneity problem. We identify four types of semantic heterogeneities related to changing semantics and present a solution based on an extension to the Context Interchange (COIN) framework. Changing semantics is represented...

The change in meaning of data over time poses significant challenges for the use of that data. These challenges exist in the use of an individual data source and are further compounded with the integration of multiple sources. In this paper, we identify three types of temporal semantic...