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. Virtual 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 Information Sources) project.