Principles of Data Integration

Preface

Over the past 20 years, the role of the database, and especially of database techniques, has changed dramatically. We have moved from a world in which an enterprise or organization had one central, relatively closed database for all record-keeping to a Web-dominated world in which many different databases and other sources of structured information must interact and interoperate, ideally in a way that gives users a fully integrated view of the world.

This book focuses on that latter world. It shows how database ideas have been broadened and deepened to accommodate external sources of information, to handle the distributed aspects of the Web and the issues that arise from mutual information sharing, and especially to deal with heterogeneity ...