Data integration with preferences among sources

Data integration systems represent today a key technological infrastructure for managing the enormous amount of information even more and more distributed over many data sources, often stored in different heterogeneous formats. Several different approaches providing transparent access to the data by means of suitable query answering strategies have been proposed in the literature. These approaches often assume that all the sources have the same level of reliability and that there is no need for preferring values "extracted" from a given source. This is mainly due to the difficulties of properly translating and reformulating source preferences in terms of properties expressed over the global view supplied by the data integration system. Nonetheless preferences are very important auxiliary information that can be profitably exploited for refining the way in which integration is carried out. In this paper we tackle the above difficulties and we propose a formal framework for both specifying and reasoning with preferences among the sources. The semantics of the system is restated in terms of preferred answers to user queries, and the computational complexity of identifying these answers is investigated as well.