BIR2011 Workshop

UOII - BIR2011 Workshop

Workshop User Oriented Information Integration (UOII) to be held in conjunction with the 10th International Conference on Perspectives in Business Informatics Research - BIR2011 -  Riga, Latvia, October 6-8, 2011.

Overview and Goals of the Workshop Sessions

There are two main approaches to information integration – virtualization, where data are stored in data sources and data integration is virtual using a global schema, which contains data source attributes; and materialization or data warehousing approach, where data are integrated, transformed and stored according to a data warehouse schema. Recent works in information integration research concern several specific cases such as "Event based data integration", "User centric data integration", "Streaming data integration" and others. Regardless of the integration approach, there is a problem that a user is provided with a huge amount of information. It is difficult for a user to orient oneself in this information and to find what is needed. In addition, widely spread internet applications based on databases have significantly boosted the number of data source users with different needs.

It is necessary to supply a user with data to such extent, format and time that is necessary for a user with appropriate technical means. For this purpose, it is necessary to specify user needs – data items, information quality, which satisfies the user (data topicality, conformity to other relevant criteria). On the other hand, there is information offer – existing data in different data sources with properties specific to these data sources – data source models, data semantics, data quality, technical parameters (accessibility etc.), as well as the existing means to integrate these data according to user needs.

Regardless of whether virtualization or materialization approach is being used, the goal of the user oriented information integration is to bring together these two parties – users and information, considering the requirement for information, rather than information supply as a key factor.

The main goal of the workshop is to discuss the relevant methods to specify the user actual information needs from many different data sources with huge amount of data, model and develop solutions to satisfy these needs.