Towards a comprehensive methodological framework for integration

Nowadays, data can be represented and stored by using different formats ranging from non structured data, typical of file systems, to semi-structured data, typical of Web sources, to highly structured data, typical of relational database systems. Therefore,the necessity arises to define new models and approaches for uniformly handling all these heterogeneous information sources. In this paper we propose a framework which aims at uniformly managing information sources having different formats and structures for obtaining a global, integrated and uniform representation.