Metamorphosis – a topic maps based environment to handle heterogeneous information resources

Abstract

Nowadays, data handled by an institution or company is spread out by more than one database and lots of documents of different types. To extract the information implicit in that data, it is necessary to pick parts from those various archives. To obtain a general overview, those information slices should be integrated. Different approaches can be followed to achieve that integration, ranging from the merge of resources till the fusion of the extracted parts. In this paper, we introduce Metamorphosis – a Topic Maps oriented environment that enables a conceptual navigation among heterogenous information systems – and we argue that Metamorphosis can be used to achieve, via Topic Maps, the referred semantic integration.