Data Integration: a Challenging ASP Application

The paper presents INFOMIX a successful application of ASP technology to the domain of Data Integration. INFOMIX is a novel system which supports powerful information integration, utilizing the ASP system DLV. While INFOMIX is based on solid theoretical foundations, it is a user-friendly system, endowed with graphical user interfaces for the average database user and administrator, respectively. The main features of the INFOMIX system are: (i) a comprehensive information model, through which the knowledge about the integration domain can be declaratively specified, (ii) capability of dealing with data that may result incomplete and/or inconsistent with respect to global constraints, (iii) advanced information integration algorithms, which reduce (in a sound and complete way) query answering to cautious reasoning on disjunctive Datalog programs, (iv) sophisticated optimization techniques guaranteeing the effectiveness of query evaluation in INFOMIX, (v) a rich data acquisition and transformation framework for accessing heterogeneous data in many formats including relational, XML, and HTML data.