Abstract

Information overload, arising from different types of heterogeneous digital data readily accessible from millions of repositories, is a critical problem on the Global Information Infrastructure (GII). We present an information brokering approach, architecture and techniques that address issues related to information overload on the GII. The approach spans three levels: representation (structure/format/type) of digital data, information content captured in the data; and the vocabulary underlying the data. Metadata (data/information about data) is used to abstract from heterogeneous representational details and capture information content. Domain specific ontologies are used to represent and interoperate across different vocabularies used to characterize information content. The approach thus suggested induces a metadata-based architecture that enables information brokering at the different levels. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated by using a wide variety of metadata to capture information content for textual, image and structured data. These metadata belong to a wide spectrum and may range from metadata independent of the data content to those capturing information content in a application and domain specific

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