Collaborative Research: Achieving Information Integration of Web Databases Through the Construction of Metasearch Engines

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The goal of this collaborative research project (0414981, W. Meng, SUNY Binghamton and 0414939, C. Yu, UIC) is to develop technologies for providing integrated access to Web databases. The approach consists of developing highly automated solutions to the following tasks: discovering Web databases from the Web, clustering them according to their application domains, integrating the search interfaces of the Web databases in the same domain into an integrated search interface, mapping each query submitted to an integrated interface to its underlying Web databases, extracting and annotating the search result records from the result pages returned from the local Web databases, and merging the results to form an integrated response for presentation to the user. Web services based interfaces of Web databases, if available, will be utilized. The evaluation of the developed algorithms is based on real Web databases from different domains. This research is expected to produce new algorithms, useful datasets, a software toolkit, and several operational Web database metasearch engines (including some for the Air Force Research Lab at Rome). The developed technology can be used in many applications including comparison shopping and collecting data from the deep Web. Research results will be incorporated into several courses the PIs teach and students will be recruited to participate in the research activities. Research results will be disseminated through published papers as well as a textbook on Web-based search technology. The project Web site (http://www.cs.binghamton.edu/~meng/DMSE.html) provides access to research results as well as datasets and demo systems.