Information Brokering: Design, Search and Transformation

Manfred A. Jeusfeld, Mike Papazoglou

	   In large human-computer networks, information brokers provide
	   links among syntactically and semantically heterogeneous
	   information sources with information users who are equally
	   diverse in their interests and capabilities. After giving
	   a brief overview of the field, we compare three approaches
	   to information brokering which share the idea of using
	   domain-oriented meta models to focus the brokering process.
	   One is intended for search in large open database networks
	   without any predefined organizational infrastructure, the
	   second for information exchange in distributed and frequently
	   changing organizations. The third approach demonstrates
	   that the ``traditional'' multi-database task of notational
	   transformation required to cover the syntactic differences
	   among information sources can be addressed in a rather
	   similar manner.