A Framework for Abstracting Data Sources Having Heterogeneous Representation Formats

This paper deals with the issue of abstracting a data source characterized by one among several possible
representation formats. First we show that data source abstraction plays a central role in several important
application problems in the area of information system design. Then we propose a new approach which is
capable of semi-automatically carrying out the abstraction of a data source possibly encoded according to
one among a variety of formats such as structured databases, OEM graphs and XML documents. The
capability to handle heterogeneous formats is obtained via the usage of a particular conceptual model,
called SDR-Network, which is able to uniformly represent and handle data sources with different formats.
As a significant application of the presented data source abstraction algorithm, the construction of an
Intensional Repository is also illustrated.