Capturing Users' Everyday, Implicit Information Integration Decisions

Integration of large databases by expert teams is only a small part of the data integration activities that take place. Users without data integration expertise very often gather, organize, reconcile, and use diverse information as a normal part of their jobs. Often, they do this by copying data into a text file or spreadsheet. In doing so, they make significant data integration decisions. They often express a mental model, or schema, over their data. They organize data to describe real-world entities. They reconcile redundancy and disagreements in their data. Such integration is both ubiquitous and not generally supported by experts and tools available for large integration efforts. We seek to capture and make explicit the user’s mental model, and the attribute and entity correspondences they express, during these activities. This paper contributes the definition of a set of functions that support this type of data integration, a conceptual model to support these functions, and an ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ER
• Authors: David W. Archer, Lois M. L. Delcambre
• Keywords: Data Integration, Data Integration Activities, Data Integration Expertise, ER 2007