Information Integration on the Web

( AAAI 2007 Tutorial)

Presenters: Subbarao Kambhampati & Craig Knoblock

Overview

The explosive growth of the web resulted in thousands of structured queryable information sources on the Internet, and the promise of unprecedented information-gathering capabilities to lay users. Unfortunately, the promise has not yet been transformed into reality. While there are sources relevant to virtually any user queries, the morass of sources presents a formidable hurdle to effectively accessing the information. One way of alleviating this problem is to develop web-based information integration agents, which take the user’s query, and access the relevant sources to answer the user’s query efficiently.

This tutorial will survey the research and systems for web-based information integration. There is a wide range of technical problems that must be addressed to integrate the diverse sources. We will describe approaches from both the Database and Artificial Intelligence communities that address these various issues. These topics include the relationship to database integration and information retrieval, languages for mediation and exchange, machine learning techniques for generating wrappers, terminology alignment for combining data across sources, query optimization, and query execution. We will also describe the various integration systems and where they fit in within the space of technical approaches. Finally, we will discuss important application areas — such as bioinformatics and geospatial data integration.