The global information society is both an opportunity and a threat for cultural diversity. The choice of direction starts right in the hands and brains of professionals and researchers designing tools and techniques that enable interchange yet preserve diversity.

My research in the domain of the integration and management of disparate information , i.e. the integration and management of multi-modal and multimedia information from distributed, heterogeneous, and autonomous sources, is motivated by this paradox.

My approach is grounded into database research for it emphasizes key ideas such as declarativeness of langages, conceptual approach to design, adaptiveness of processing and optimization of programs and queries in the challenging hypothesis of large numbers of users and large collections of data.

In details my contributions are in domains such as mediation systems, the integration and management of XML and semistructred data, peer to peer systems, but also geographical information systems and natural language processing and information retrieval (for the Indonesian language).

I am a co-author of the XOO7 benchmark. I am co- architect and a co-developer of the ECRC Chimera Deductive and Object Oriented Database Management System. I am architect and developer of MIT's COIN context interchange prototype.