  Information Integration is a young and exciting field with enormous research
and commercial significance in the new world of the Information Society. It
stands at the crossroad of Databases and Artificial Intelligence requiring
novel techniques that bring together different methods from these fields.
Information from disparate heterogeneous sources often with no a-priori common
schema needs to be synthesized in a flexible, transparent and intelligent way
in order to respond to the demands of a query thus enabling a more informed
decision by the user or application program. The field although relatively
young has already found many practical applications particularly for
integrating information over the World Wide Web. This paper gives a brief
introduction of the field highlighting some of the main current and future
research issues and application areas. It attempts to evaluate the current and
potential role of Computational Logic in this and suggests some of the problems
where logic-based techniques could be used.
