IIT Intranet Mediator: bringing data together on a corporate intranet

A mediator is a software module that interacts with a user and a variety of data sources to provide one-stop shopping for an organization´s data. This approach is especially attractive when taken over a large, heterogeneous system of data, because the cost of source integration for such a system is high. Intranet and digital libraries could benefit from mediators because they handle myriad data types and must treat all data appropriately, according to its type. A mediator´s key goal is to simply answer natural-language questions, deriving answers from sources that contain structured, semistructured, and unstructured data in a particular domain. Various efforts, like those conducted as part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology´s annual Text Retrieval Conference, focus on unstructured sources. The IIT Intranet Mediator extends these efforts to include structured and semistructured sources