An Overview of Information Integration

Information integration is the problem of combining the data residing at different heterogeneous sources to provid the user with a unified view of these data. The problem of designing information integration systems is important in current real world applications,and becomes a hot topic of the database research. This paper tries to present an overview of this topic and provides some research problems in the future. The important aspects include methods of information integration,information integration framework,query processing,semi-structured data and Web information integration.