Information intermediation is the foundation stone of some of the most successful Internet companies, and is perhaps second only to the Internet Infrastructure companies. On the heels of information integration and interoperability, this book on information brokering discusses the next step in information interoperability and integration.
The emerging Internet economy based on burgeoning B2B and B2C trading will soon demand semantics-based information intermediation for its feasibility and success. B2B ventures are involved in the `rationalization' of new vertical markets and construction of domain specific product catalogs. This book provides approaches for re-use of existing vocabularies and domain ontologies as a basis for this rationalization and provides a framework based on inter-ontology interoperation. Infrastructural trade-offs that identify optimizations in performance and scalability of web sites will soon give way to information based trade-offs as alternate rationalization schemes come into play and the necessity of interoperating across these schemes is realized.
Information Brokering Across Heterogeneous Digital Data's intended readers are researchers, software architects and CTOs, advanced product developers dealing with information intermediation issues in the context of e-commerce (B2B and B2C), information technology professionals in various vertical markets (e.g., geo-spatial information, medicine, auto), and all librarians interested in information brokering.

Autorentext
Vipul Kashyap, PhD is a Senior Medical Informatician in the Clinical Informatics Research&Development group at Partners HealthCare System. He plays the role of a systems and information architect in the content of a platform for Clinical Knowledge Management Platform and creating of clinical information models in the context of the Enterprise Clinical Services architecture at Partners Healthcare System. Vipul has received his PhD from the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University in New Brunswick that investigated the use of metadata and ontologies for information and knowledge management. He was a co-project manager of a Knowledge Management effort at Telcordia Technologies (formerly known as Bellcore) focused on knowledge sharing and reuse across Telcordia's Professional Services Units. He was a fellow at the National Library of Medicine, and has held positions at Micro-electronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Vipul has published 2 books on the topic of Semantics in Information Brokering and Integration, 40-50 articles in prestigious conferences andjournals. He serves on the editorial boards of 3 journals and sits on the technical advisory board of an early stage companies developing semantics-based products. He also represents Partners on the W3C Advisory Committee and the EHR Technical Committee of the HealthCare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP).

Inhalt
Metadata and Ontologies.- Metadata-Based Architectures for Information Brokering.- Metadata-based Brokering for Digital Data.- Capturing Information Content in Structured Data.- The Infosleuth System.- Vocabulary Brokering in the Observer System.- An Illustrative Example.- Related Work.- Conclusion.