SI-Designer: an Integration Framework for E-Commerce

Electronic commerce lets people purchase goods and exchange information on business transactions on-line. Therefore one of the main challenges for the designers of the e-commerce infrastructures is the information sharing, retrieving data located in different sources thus obtaining an integrated view to overcome any contradiction or redundancy. Vir- tual Catalogs synthesize this approach as they are conceived as instruments to dynamically retrieve information from multiple catalogs and present product data in a unified manner, without directly storing product data from catalogs. In this paper we propose SI-Designer, a support tool for the integration of data from structured and semi-structured data sources, developed within the MOMIS (Mediator environment for Multiple Infor- mation Sources) project.