Bootstrapping pay-as-you-go data integration systems

Data integration systems offer a uniform interface to a set of data sources. Despite recent progress, setting up and maintaining a data integration application still requires significant upfront effort of creating a mediated schema and semantic mappings from the data sources to the mediated schema. Many application contexts involving multiple data sources (e.g., the web, personal information management, enterprise intranets) do not require full integration in order to provide useful services, motivating a pay-as-you-go approach to integration. With that approach, a system starts with very few (or inaccurate) semantic mappings and these mappings are improved over time as deemed necessary.