ABSTRACT
Recent developments in information systems technologies have resulted in computerizing many applications in various business areas. Data have become a critical resource in many organizations, and, therefore, efficient access to data, sharing the data, extracting informa tion from the data, and making use of the information has become an urgent need. As a result, there have been many efforts on not only integrating the various data sources scattered across several sites, but extracting information from these databases in the form of patterns, and trends have also become important. These data sources may be data bases managed by database management systems, or they could be data warehoused in a repository from multiple data sources. The advent of the World Wide Web (WWW) in the mid 1990s has resulted in even greater demand for managing data, information and knowledge effec tively. There is now so much data on the web that managing it with conventional tools is becoming almost an impossibility. New tools and techniques are needed to effectively manage this data. Therefore, to provide the interoperability as well as warehousing between the multiple data sources and systems, and to extract information from the databases and warehouses on the web, various tools are being developed.
