An extensible approach to data fusion in distributed computing environments

The paper belongs to the area of development of methods and tools for data integration. One of the most important stages of data integration is data fusion, i. e., the combination of records relating to the same real-world entity into a single record with conflict resolution for each of the attributes. The paper considers the formal statement of the data fusion problem, provides a brief review of major groups of data fusion methods. An approach for implementation of the data fusion stage within an extensible heterogeneous data integration system in a distributed computing environment is proposed. Software architecture and basic implementation ideas of the approach are considered.