This research addresses incentive principles that drive information sharing and affect database value. Many real world centralization and standardization efforts have failed, typically because departments lacked incentives or needed greater local autonomy. While intangible factors such as...

The shift towards global networking brings with it many opportunities and challenges. In this paper, we discuss key technologies in achieving global semantic interoperability among heterogeneous information systems, including both traditional and web data sources. In particular, we focus on the...

To recover from media failures, a database is 'restored' from an earlier backup copy. A recovery log of transactions is used to roll forward from the backup version to the desired time (the current time). High availability requires that the backup copying be fast, and be in parallel with...

The integration of data from autonomous and heterogeneous sources calls for the prior identification and resolution of semantic conflicts that may be present. Unfortunately, this requires the system integrator to sift through the data from disparate systems in a painstaking manner. In this...

This paper examines the development of web aggregators, entities that collect information from a wide range of sources, with or without prior arrangements, and add value through post-aggregation services. New Web-page extraction tools, context sensitive mediators, and agent technologies have...

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...

The development of web technology has led to the emergence of web aggregation, a service that collects existing web data and turns them into more useful information. We review the development of both comparison and relationship aggregation and discuss their impacts on various stakeholders. The...

Using securities industry examples, the context interchange mediation knowledge architecture is applied to interoperability problems for enumerated data types, such as codes and other symbols used to represent conceptual distinctions. Ongoing efforts in the securities industry to develop new...

This paper examines the opportunities and challenges related to data and process integration architectures in the context of Web Services. A primary goal of most enterprises in today's economic environment is to improve productivity by streamlining and aggregating business processes. This paper...

One of the appealing features of artificial intelligence is the ability to come up with the “right” answer automatically, faster and more reliably than humans. In many cases, the right answer is singular and unambiguous, such as 2 + 2 = 4 (3.9 or 4.1 are close, but not right.). But, as is...