The ESTEST System - Combining Data Integration and Information Extraction

We describe an approach which combines techniques from Data Integration and Infor- mation Extraction in order to make better use of the unstructured data found in appli- cations built over databases containing both structured data and text. We give details of the implementation of our ESTEST system which integrates available data sources into a global schema used to partially configure an Information Extraction process. The resulting extracted information is merged into this virtual global database and is subsequently available for query processing. We give preliminary experimental results from the system in use.