This book is the first comprehensive approach to the construction and the management of cooperative information systems. From a set of input database schemes describing the information content of multiple sources, the techniques presented yield a structured, integrated and consistent description of the information content represented in a suitable data repository. The author builds his work on skilled and controlled use of results and methods from various fields of computer science, such as data mining, algorithmic learning, knowledge representation, database management, etc. The approach presented has been implemented in the prototype system DIKE, Database Intensional Knowledge Extractor, which has been studied in various application contexts.