Alon Halevy, Wang-Chiew Tan, George Mihaila, Behzad Golshan
The field of data integration has expanded significantly over the years, from providing a uniform query and update interface to structured databases within an enterprise to the ability to search, ex- change, and even update, structured or unstructured data that are within or external to the enterprise. This paper describes the evolution in the landscape of data integration since the work on rewriting queries using views in the mid-1990’s. In addition, we describe two important challenges for the field going forward. The first challenge is to develop good open-source tools for different components of data integration pipelines. The second challenge is to provide practitioners with viable solutions for the long-standing problem of systematically combining structured and unstructured data.