On Information Integration in Large Scientific Collaborations

We discuss the requirements for information integration in large scientific collaborations and arrive at the conclusion that an architecture is needed that follows the declarative paradigm for reasoning completeness, maintainability and reuse of previously encoded knowledge but does not take the classical approach of integrating all sources against a single common “global” information model. Instead, we propose a local-as-view infrastructure that allows to make integrated information from remote sources available to individual (legacy) information systems across multiple different integration models. We discuss our architecture and compare it to previous approaches in the literature. European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), CH1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland. [email protected] On leave from Technische Universität Wien, Austria. †Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien, Austria. [email protected] ‡European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). [email protected] §Centre for Complex Cooperative Systems, University of the West of England, Bristol BS16 1QY, UK. [email protected]