Needs, Tools, and the State of Research

Abstract

The basic tenet of the following considerations is the widely-adopted conviction of a generally increasing demand for information in all planning and decision tasks affecting individual businesses and society as a whole alike, as an improved and timely access to information as well as advanced methods of information processing have already become tangible factors of competitiveness, economic prosperity, and social stability and welfare. However, despite the abundance of data and the presence of quite powerful information technologies for data processing, the effective conversion of data into information is in fact the really critical, and limiting, issue. In particular, if data of different origins has to be merged, implying that different data contexts have to be merged either, current information technologies, by and large, still fail to meet the pressing demands for interlacing and fusing data semantically such that combined data are amenable to a coherent interpretation.