Probabilistic XML in Information Integration

Information integration is a difficult research problem. In an ambient environment, where devices can connect and disconnect arbitrarily, the problem only increases, because data sources may become available at any time, but can also disappear. In such an environment, information integration needs to be unattended, because information integration opportunities arise on ad-hoc basis. We propose to use probabilistic XML to store the integration result and instead of resolving conflicts at integration time, just store these conflicts in the integrated information source and resolve them at query time.