Showing papers by "Rakesh Mohan published in 2005"

Methods and apparatus for information integration in accordance with web services

Abstract: Techniques are disclosed for improved information integration in accordance with information sources such as web services in a distributed information system. For example, a technique for processing a query obtained from a user in an information integration system, wherein the information integration system is associated with a database and one or more information sources, comprises the following steps/operations. The user query is transformed to one or more queries valid with respect to one or more of the information sources associated with the database. Based on the one or more transformed queries, a query plan executable on the database is generated, wherein at least a portion of results returned to the user in response to the query are based on at least a portion of results returned from execution of the query plan. In one embodiment, the information sources may be web services. Further, a number, a nature and/or an identity of the one or more information sources may be dynamic or change over time.

Strategic Sourcing and Procurement

Abstract: Recent developments in IT have focused on providing a platform that facilitates and streamlines the activities of the purchasing department within an enterprise. Cost savings that are realized in these activities have a direct impact on the bottom line of an organization and the growing number of testimonials about excellent ROI has prompted companies to consider sourcing and procurement as the next large IT investment. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the various functions in sourcing and procurement and the techniques that are required to enable a large enterprise to rationalize their sourcing and procurement function. In an enterprise there are two kinds of procurement:

Semantic query transformation for integrating web information sources

Abstract: The heterogeneousness and dynamics of web information sources are the major challenges to Internet-scale information integration. The information sources are different in contents and query interfaces. In addition, the sources can be highly dynamic in the sense that they can be added, removed, or updated with time. This paper introduces a novel information integration framework that leverages the industry standards on web services (WSDL/SOAP) and ontology description language (RDF/OWL), and a commercial database (IBM DB2 Information Integrator⎯DB2 II (DB2 II)). Taking advantage of the data integration and query optimization capability of DB2 II, this paper focuses on the methodologies to transform a user query to the queries on different sources and to combine the transformation results into a query to DB2 II. By wrapping information sources using web services and annotating them with regard to their contents, query capabilities and the logical relations between concepts, our query transformation engine is rooted in ontology-based reasoning. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first framework that uses web services as the interface of information sources and combines ontology-based reasoning, web services, semantic annotation on web services, as well as DB2 II to support Internet-scale information integration.