Semantic Integration of Real World Data

When heterogeneous databases are combined, they typically have different schemas (i.e., ways in which the data is stored). For information to be shared between these databases, there must be some way for differences in representation to be resolved. Combining these heterogeneous sources so that they can be queried uniformly is known as semantic integration. There are many aspects to semantic integration, including how to create the underlying system that allows queries to be processed to allowing the user to understand the overpowering amount of data available. In this talk I describe some of the research that my students and I have been doing to increase datas usefulness through semantic integration, particularly by being motivated by real world semantic integration applications.
Rachel Pottinger is an assistant professor in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. She received her PhD in computer science from the University of Washington in 2004. Her main research interest is data management, particularly semantic data integration, how to manage metadata (i.e., data about data), and how to manage data that is currently not well supported by databases.