International Journal of Computer Science and Applications c  Technomathematics Research Foundation Vol. 7 No. 2, pp. 14 - 29, 2010 INFORMATION INTEGRATION IN SEARCHY: AN ONTOLOGY AND WEB SERVICES BASED APPROACH DAVID F. BARRERO, MAR ´ IA D. R-MORENO Computer Engineering Department, University of Alcal´ a Ediﬁcio Polit´ ecnico Crta. Madrid-Barcelona Km. 33,6 Alcal´ a de Henares, Madrid 28871,Spain (david|mdolores)@aut.uah.es http://atc1.aut.uah.es/ ˜ (david|mdolores) DIEGO R. LOPEZ RedIRIS Ediﬁcio CICA Avenida Reina Mercedes s/n Seville, Spain diego.lopez@rediris.es Organisations need from heterogeneous information systems to deal with the complexity of information management. The result is the creation of isolated views of the informa- tion and therefore an inherent diﬃculty to obtain a global view. Being able to provide such an uniﬁed and global view of the -likely heterogeneus- information available in an organisation is a goal that provides added-value to the information systems. To address this problem several Enterprise Information Integration (EII) solutions have been pro- posed. In this paper, we present an EII solution named Searchy. Searchy is a agent-based platform which, through the utilization of heterogeneous semantic wrappers, integrates information from arbitrary sources and translates them into semantic terms. Its dis- tributed nature and non intrusive operation enables it to operate in a B2B environments where several entities share their information systems. Keywords : Information Integration; metasearch; MAS. 1. Introduction There are many factors that can explain the success of web technologies. One of them is the fact that the Web has been able to integrate the information and services that were available on the Internet. Several classical services on Internet like Gopher, Archie, FTP and even the email have found on the Web a way to unify their services or to give a coherent integrated user interface. The users only have to deal with a tool, the browser, that is easy to use and provides uniform access to information as well as services. The way in which the Web eased the use of Internet contributed to its socialization in the mid-nineties. 14