Building the Information Society

Data integration is one of the older research fields in the database area and has emerged shortly after database systems were first introduced into the business world. In this paper, we briefly introduce the problem of integration and, based on an architectural perspective, give an overview of approaches to address the integration issue. We discuss the evolution from structural to semantic integration and provide a short outlook on our own research in the SIRUP (Semantic Integration Reflecting User-specific semantic Perspectives) approach.