Title: Querying structured information sources on the Web

Authors: Sergio Mergen, Juliana Freire, Carlos A. Heuser

Addresses: Instituto de Informatica, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do SUL (UFRGS), Porto Alegre 91501-970, Brazil. ' School of Computing, University of Utah, Salt Lake City 84112, USA. ' Instituto de Informatica, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do SUL (UFRGS), Porto Alegre 91501-970, Brazil

Abstract: To provide access to heterogeneous data distributed over the Web, we propose a solution that merges the expressiveness of information integration systems with the flexibility found in dataspace-aware search engines. Our approach requires neither a mediated schema nor source mappings. In the absence of a mediated schema, the user formulates structured queries based on what she expects to find. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by providing a query interface for integrating hundreds of (real) structured Web information sources. We also discuss experimental results which indicate that our query rewriting algorithm is both effective and scalable.

Keywords: search engines; dataspaces; information integration; query rewriting; structured information; internet; structured queries; web sources.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMSO.2010.034045

International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, 2010 Vol.5 No.3, pp.208 - 221

Published online: 06 Jul 2010 *

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