CAREER: Querying Information Sources Across The Internet

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The goal of this research project is to help users find the information that they need over the Internet. Unfortunately, Internet information sources vary widely in the types of information and access interfaces they provide. Furthermore, the number of available sources is overwhelming to users. Therefore, using this wealth of resources effectively presents challenging problems. To address these problems, the research goals of the project include: (1) smart query processing over HTML documents, using information like query logs, citations, and user feedback to find the most useful documents for a query; (2) extraction of succinct summaries of information sources with varying capabilities and interfaces, so that the evaluation of user queries can focus on only the most useful information sources; (3) integration of query results from multiple heterogeneous information sources, so that users can query multiple sources and still receive a single, coherent query result; (4) integration of text, relational, and image repositories, so that users can use all available information regardless of its format. The educational objectives include the expansion of the curriculum in databases and information systems at Columbia University. In particular, a new course covers the latest trends in database and information systems. In summary, this project will develop the tools to provide users with seamless and transparent access to the large number and variety of Internet sources. In effect, users will be able to express their information need in simple ways, and receive the relevant data with no further involvement in the processing of their queries. http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~gravano