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                      INFORMATION SYSTEMS
              http://www.elsevier.com/locate/is

                         CALL FOR PAPERS

                         SPECIAL ISSUE ON
            DATA EXTRACTION, CLEANING, AND RECONCILIATION

       Guest Editors: Mokrane Bouzeghoub, Maurizio Lenzerini

                           Winter 2001

The problem of integrating data coming from multiple heterogeneous
sources has been the subject of many investigations in the last years.
Information integration is a very complex problem, and is relevant in
several fields, such as Data Re-engineering, Data Warehouses, Web
Information Systems, E-commerce, Scientific Databases, etc. Within
information integration, the task of extracting, cleaning, and
reconciling data coming from multiple sources requires substantial
efforts and resources. Despite its importance, this task is often
underestimated by the scientific and the research community. Existing
tools often deal with one of the numerous aspects of the problem, but a
global, conceptual, perspective harmonizing all the facets of the
problem is still missing. As a result, many applications are based on
ad-hoc approaches, which are difficult to share and compare.

The purpose of this special issue is to present well-founded approaches
to the problem of data extraction, cleaning and reconciliation. In
particular, we encourage submissions that compare the proposed
approaches  (through experiments or through proofs) with existing tools,
in order to point out the advantages of a scientific approach to the
problem, and the possibility for the
technology to improve the current solutions.  Topics addressed by this
special issue include:

- Architectures, methodologies and tools for data extraction, cleaning,
and reconciliation
- Data extaction, cleaning, and reconciliation in Data Warehousing and
Information Systems Re-engineering
- Data extraction, cleaning, and reconciliation in the Web
- Extraction, cleaning, and reconciliation of semistructured data
- Optimization techniques in data extraction, cleaning, and
reconciliation
- Reviews of existing tools
- Methodologies, languages, and tools for dealing with data
inconsistencies
- Quality factors in data extraction, cleaning, and reconciliation
- Experiences in data extraction, cleaning, and reconciliation

Information Systems. An International Journal is a premier journal for
the publication of research results in the design and implementation of
languages, data models, software and hardware for information systems.
Subject areas include data management issues as presented in the
principal international database conferences (eg ACM SIGMOD, ACM PODS,
VLDB and EDBT) as well as data-related issues from the fields of
knowledge-based systems, information retrieval, programming languages,
and organizational behavior.

We welcome both research and experience papers for this special issue.
Full-length versions of papers that have been published in recent
peer-reviewed conferences in databases and information systems are also
welcome. Papers should be 10000 to 15000 words long.



Submission instructions

Please send a Postscript or PDF copy of your submission to
- Mokrane.Bouzeghoub@prism.uvsq.fr
and
- lenzerini@dis.uniroma1.it
by May 31, 2000. Authors should follow the general author instructions
of Information Systems, available at
ftp://kubin.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/pub/InfSys/styles/latex.

Authors will be notified by July 31, 2000. Final versions of the
accepted papers are due on September 20, 2000. The special issue is
scheduled for appearance in Winter 2001. More information can be
obtained from the editors at the above email addresses. The home page
for the special issue is at
http://www.dis.uniroma1.it/~lenzerini/infosys/specialissue.html.



Important dates:

Submission of papers: May 31, 2000
Author notification: July 31, 2000
Final papers due: September 20, 2000
Scheduled appearance: Winter 2001



Guest Editors:

Mokrane Bouzeghoub
Laboratoire PRiSM
Universite de Versailles
45 avenue des Etats-Unis
78035 Versailles Cedex, FRANCE
E-mail: Mokrane.Bouzeghoub@prism.uvsq.fr
http://www.prism.uvsq.fr/english/databases/kheops/people/mok.html

Maurizio Lenzerini
Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica
Universita' degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza"
Via Salaria 113,  I-00198  Roma,  ITALY
E-mail:    lenzerini@dis.uniroma1.it
http://www.dis.uniroma1.it/~lenzerini