Enabling personal perspectives on heterogeneous information spaces

Todays Internet holds a large number of information spaces, within which information is categorized according to some schema. Each categorization schema also represents a perspective on a knowledge domain. For access to different information spaces, a user has to adopt different perspectives. These differences in perspectives often prevent an ongoing exchange of information between information spaces. We present a system (CAIMAN), which allows a user to maintain the same personal perspective on different information spaces. In addition to that, CAIMAN offers a set of services which facilitate the exchange of information between information spaces. These services support the user in browsing, retrieving information from and submitting information to different information spaces. To allow a user to maintain a personal perspective on different information spaces, we perform a mapping of the user´s categorization schema to the categorization schemas of other information spaces