Querying Heterogeneous Information Sources Using Source Descriptions-英文文献.pdfVIP

Querying Heterogeneous Information Sources Using Source Descriptions Alon Y Levy Anand Ra jaraman Joann J Ordille ATT Lab oratories Stanford University Bell Lab oratories levyresearchattcom anandcsstanfordedu joannresearc hattcom Abstract We witness a rapid increase in the numb er of structured information sources that are avail able online esp ecially on the WWW These sources include commercial databases on pro duct information sto ck market information real estate automobiles and entertainment We would like to use the data stored in these databases to answer complex queries that go b eyond keyword searches We face the following challenges Several information sources store interrelated data and any queryanswering system must understand the relationships b etween their con tents Many sources are not fullfeatured database systems and can answer only a small set of queries over their data for example forms on the WWW restrict the set of queries one can ask Since the numb er of sources is very large eective techniques are needed to prune the set of information sources accessed to answer a query The details of interacting with each source vary greatly We describ e the Information Manifold an implemented system that provides uniform access to a heterogeneous collection of more than information sources many of them on the WWW IM tackles the ab ove problems by providing a mechanism to describ e declaratively the contents and query capabilities of available information sources There is a clean separation b etween the declarative source description and the ac