01_Efficient Distributed Skylining for Web Information Syste

Efficient Distributed Skylining for Web Information Systems 1 2 1 Wolf-Tilo Balke , Ulrich Güntzer , Jason Xin Zheng 1 Computer Science Department, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA {balke, xzheng}@ 2 Insitut für Informatik, Universität Tübingen, 72076 Tübingen, Germany guentzer@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de Abstract. Though skyline queries already have claimed their place in retrieval over central databases, their application in Web information systems up to now was impossible due to the distributed aspect of retrieval over Web sources. But due to the amount, variety and volatile nature of information accessible over the Internet extended query capabilities are crucial. We show how to efficiently perform distributed skyline queries and thus essentially extend the expressive- ness of querying today’s Web information systems. Together with our innova- tive retrieval algorithm we also present useful heuristics to further speed up the retrieval in most practical cases paving the road towards meeting even the real- time challenges of on-line information services. We discuss performance evaluations and point to open problems in the concept and application of sky- lining in modern information systems. For the curse of dimensionality, an in- trinsic problem in skyline queries, we propose a novel sampling scheme that al- lows to get an early impression of the skyline for subsequent query refinement. 1 Introduction In times of the ubi