IIT Intranet Mediator: bringing data together on a corporate intranet

A mediator is a software module that interacts with a user and a variety of data sources to provide one-stop shopping for an organization's data. This approach is especially attractive when taken over a large, heterogeneous system of data, because the cost of source integration for such a system is high. Intranet and digital libraries could benefit from mediators because they handle myriad data types and must treat all data appropriately, according to its type. A mediator's key goal is to simply answer natural-language questions, deriving answers from sources that contain structured, semistructured, and unstructured data in a particular domain. Various efforts, like those conducted as part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology's annual Text Retrieval Conference, focus on unstructured sources. The IIT Intranet Mediator extends these efforts to include structured and semistructured sources.