Speaker: Associate Professor Martin Purvis, Bryce McKinlay, Mariusz
Nowostawski, Roy Ward, and Dan Carter

Abstract:
These days we are blessed with access to an ever-expanding network
of available information sources, and ãdistributed information systemsä
are intended to provide integrated access to the various sources of information
that are accessible over the network.Ê So far, however, the task of
integrating the heterogeneous collection of data sets that are ãout thereä
has met with only limited success.Ê The difficulty has been that the
various data sources to which we have access are not only stored according
to differing media types and storage formats ö they are also organisedÊ
according to differing semantics.ÊÊ As a consequence, the rapid
growth in available distributed information has considerably outstripped
our capacity to organise and interpret it efficiently.Ê This talk
describes work in the New Zealand Distributed Information Systems project,
a research effort in the Information Science Department that seeks to develop
methods to address some of these problems and lead to more effective distributed
information systems.