XI³ - Towards an Integration Web

The World Wide Web with its distributed and decentralized architecture has become the biggest information system ever. But it is fragmented into countless information sources which are required in combination for satisfying a certain information need. Many information integration systems were proposed during the last decade, allowing centralized access to distributed heterogeneous information sources and exploring some fundamental integration problems. Although these systems have been proven to be successful and solve some of the key integration problems, they do not scale up to the size of the web, and flexible reuse of the results by other communities (like the Semantic Web community) is still difficult to achieve. We strongly believe that integration in the large can become successful only if it is seen as a cooperative task in which reuse and extensibility become intrinsic. Like the paradigm of the Web itself, allowing provision and linkage of content by individuals, the Integration Web has to provide the means for the provision and linkage of integration steps by individuals. In analogy to the distribution of information providers on the Web, we thus envision the establishment of an infrastructure for integration services providers. In this paper we present the overall approach of XML- based Intelligent Integration of Information (XI³). The reference architecture and the core services are explained. Built-in reuse and extensibility are exemplified. We illustrate our approach with the help of the knowledge intensive task of hardware administration. Keywords: Infrastructure for Distributed and Heterogeneous Systems, Web-based Systems and their applications, web services, information systems, middleware technologies, mediators, semantic interoperability, Semantic Web, XML, RDF