Integrating Diverse Information Management Systems: A Brief Survey

Most current information management systems can be classified into text retrieval systems, relational/object database systems, or semistructured/XML database systems. However, in practice, many applications data sets involve a combination of free text, structured data, and semistructured data. Hence, integration of different types of information management systems has been, and continues to be, an active research topic. In this paper, we present a short survey of prior work on integrating and inter-operating between text, structured, and semistructured database systems. We classify existing literature based on the kinds of systems being integrated and the approach to integration. Based on this classification, we identify the challenges and the key themes underlying existing work in this area.