Heuristics for automated knowledge source integration and service composition

The NP-hard component set identification problem is a combinatorial problem arising in the context of knowledge discovery, information integration, and knowledge source/service composition. Considering a granular knowledge domain consisting of a large number of individual bits and pieces of domain knowledge (properties) and a large number of knowledge sources and services that provide mappings between sets of properties, the objective of the component set identification problem is to select a minimum cost combination of knowledge sources that can provide a joint mapping from a given set of initially available properties (initial knowledge) to a set of initially unknown proper-ties (target knowledge). We provide a general framework for heuristics and consider construction heuristics that are followed by local improvement heuristics. Computational results are reported on randomly generated problem instances. (C) 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd.