The purpose of the workshop is to devote national attention to the need for identifying and comprehensively examining the major challenges in the area of information integration (II) and the required long-term research, engineering and development that will be needed to advance the state of the art and state of the practice in the application of advanced IT to resolve these challenges in the near- and long-term. The type and modality of information available in digital form is vast - image, video, text, audio, sensor and other forms of streaming data, as well as structured data such as databases and XML/ HTML documents. Although the data may be geographically distributed, collected and designed for specific uses and applications ("silos" of information), it is often logically inter-related, and many important questions can only be answered by accessing it collectively. However, despite considerable research and development over the last 20 years, truly ad hoc II, where disparate information systems are accessed efficiently in real time in response to unanticipated information needs and data is combined to form reliable answers to queries, remains an elusive goal. A systematic development of II technologies is needed to provide the necessary infrastructure leading to significant advances in the access to and analysis of widely distributed, heterogeneous, disparate information resources. Of particular importance to this workshop will be issues associated with the integration of science and engineering data and Federal, medical, and other records.
