For industries ranging from software to pharmaceuticals and entertainment, there is an intense debate about the appropriate level of protection for intellectual property. The Internet provides a natural crucible to assess the implications of reduced protection because it drastically lowers the...

The web is undoubtedly the largest and most diverse repository of data, but it was not designed to offer the capabilities of traditional data base management systems - which is unfortunate. In a true data federation, all types of data sources, such as relational databases and semi-structured...