CSCI 599: Information Integration on the Web

Spring 2003

Instructor: Craig Knoblock (knoblock@isi.edu)

Office Hours:

Tuesday 1:00pm - 2:00pm (PHE 416)
Tussday 4:50 - 5:30 (THH 112)
By Appointment (ISI 907)

Teaching Assistant: Snehal Thakkar (thakkar@isi.edu)

Office Hours:

Monday 2-3pm (SAL 200c)
Tuesday 10-11am (SAL 200c)

Meeting Time:

Tuesday 2:00-4:50 (THH 119)

Location:

THH 119

What's New

April 29th, 2003: All lecture slides have been posted
April 16th, 2003: Consolidate Operator for Theseus is Available. Documentation, Jar File
April 14th, 2003:All readings have been posted on the web
March 26th, 2003:Readings for Lecture 11, slides for Lecture 9,10 are posted
March 7th, 2003:Readings for Lecture 9, 10 are posted
March 5th, 2003:Lecture notes for Lecture 8, homework 7, and heracles download instructions are posted
February 28th, 2003:Lecture notes for Lecture 7, readings for Lecture 8, and homework 6 are posted
February 12th, 2003:Theseus release is available here

Course Syllabus

Course Materials: Notes, Slides, Papers, and Homeworks

Lecture 1: Introduction
- Readings:
  - The ariadne approach to web-based information integration
    C. Knoblock, S. Minton, J.L. Ambite, N. Ashish, I. Muslea, A. Philpot, S. Tejada.
    International the Journal on Cooperative Information Systems (IJCIS) Special Issue on Intelligent Information Agents: Theory and Applications,10(1/2):145-169, 2001.
  - The TheaterLoc Application
    G. Barish, C. Knoblock, Y.-S. Chen, S. Minton, A. Philpot, C. Shahabi.
    In Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-200), Austin, TX, 2000.
- Slides:
  - Course Introduction
  - Ariadne Project Overview
  - TheaterLoc Case Study
  - Example Projects
    - Reverse Geocoder by Shou-de Lin Final Presentation Report
    - Portfolio Analyzer by Parag Somdadiya and Ritu Kothari Final Presentation Report
    - Map Builder by Mehdi Sharifzadeh Final Presentation Report
    - A Simplified Mediator by Snehal Thakkar Final Presentation Report
Lecture 2: Wrapper Learning
- Readings:
  - Hierarchical Wrapper Induction for Semistructured Information Sources
    I. Muslea, S. Minton, C. Knoblock
    Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 4:93-114, 2001.
  - Generating Finite-State Transducers for Semi-Structured Data Extraction from the Web
    Chun-Nan Hsu and Ming-Tzung Dung
    Information systems Journal, 23(8):521-538, 1998.
- Slides:
  - Wrapper Learning
  - Introduction to Agent Builder
- Hw 1: Introduction to AgentBuilder Homework 1 FAQ
Lecture 3: Automated Wrapper Generation
- Readings:
  - Automatic Data Extraction from Lists and Tables in Web Sources
    Kristina Lerman, Craig A. Knoblock and Steven Minton,
    Automatic Text Extraction and Mining workshop (ATEM-01), IJCAI-01, Seattle, WA, August 2001.
  - RoadRunner: Towards Automatic Data Extraction from Large Web Sites
    W. Crescenzi, G. Mecca, P. Merialdo,
    The VLDB Journal, 109-118, 2001.
  - Using Grammatical Inference to Automate Information Extraction from the Web,
    Theodore W. Hong and Keith L. Clark,
    Lecture Notes in Computer Science,2168, 2001
- Slides:
  - Automatic Wrapper Generation
  - Advanced Agent Builder
- Hw 2: Advanced AgentBuilder
Lecture 4: Automatic Source Modeling
- Readings:
  - Wrapper maintenance: A machine learning approach
    Kristina Lerman, Steven Minton, and Craig A. Knoblock.
    To appear in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 2003.
  - Learning to Understand Information on the Internet: An Example-Based Approach
    Mike Perkowitz and Robert B. Doorenbos and Oren Etzioni and Daniel S. Weld.
    Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, 8(2):133-153, 1997.
- Slides:
- Hw 3: .Net zip file
Lecture 5: Dataflow Architectures
- Readings:
  - An Expressive and Efficient Language for Information Gathering on the Web
    Greg Barish, and Craig A. Knoblock.
    Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on AI Planning and Scheduling (AIPS-2002) Workshop: Is There Life Beyond Operator Sequencing? - Exploring Real-World Planning,Toulouse, France. April 2002.
  - An XML Query Engine for Network-Bound Data
    Zachary G. Ives, Alon Y. Halevy, Daniel S. Weld
    VLDB Journal,11(4),2002.
- Slides:
  - Dataflow Execution
  - Theseus
- HW 4, Thesues release for class
Lecture 6: XQuery and Semantic Web
- Readings:
  - What is XQuery ?
    Per Bothner.
  - Semantic Web
    By Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila
    Scientific American, May 2001 issue
  - A Comparison of (Semantic) Markup Languages,
    Varun Ratnakar and Yolanda Gil,
    Proceedings of the 15th International FLAIRS Conference, Special Track on Semantic Web, Pensacola, FL, May 2002.
- Slides:
  - X Query
  - Semantic Web
- HW 5: X Query homework
Lecture 7: Dataflow Architectures (Cont'd)
- Readings:
  - Speculative Execution for Information Gathering Plans,
    Greg Barish and Craig A. Knoblock,
    Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on AI Planning and Scheduling (AIPS-2002), Toulouse, France. April 2002.
  - Eddies: Continuously Adaptive Query Processing,
    Ron Avnur and Joseph M. Hellerstein,
    In Proceedings of the 2000 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data,Dallas, TX, May 2000.
  - Partial Results for Online Query Processing,
    Vijayshankar Raman and Joseph M. Hellerstein,
    In Proceedings of the 2002 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data,Madison, Wisconsin, June 2003.
- Slides:
  - Network Query Engines
  - Speculative Execution
- HW 6: Advanced Theseus
Lecture 8: Constraint Integration
- Readings:
  - Mixed-Initiative, Multi-source Information Assistants,
    Craig A. Knoblock, Steve Minton, Jose Luis Ambite, Maria Muslea, Jean Oh, and Martin Frank,
    The Tenth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW10), Hong Kong, 2001.
  - Smartclients: Constraint satisfaction as a paradigm for scaleable intelligent information system,
    M. Torrens and B. Faltings,
    In Workshop: Artificial Intelligence for Electronic Commerce (AAAI-00), 1999.
- Slides:
  - Constraint Integration
- HW 7 Heracles relase, Oracle XQuery program (optional), use username heracles and same password as theseus download password.
Lecture 9: Record Linkage
- Readings:
  - Reconciling Schemas of Disparate Data Sources: A Machine Learning Approach,
    A. Doan, P. Domingos, and A. Halevy
    Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD Conf. on Management of Data, 2001.
  - Learning domain-independent string transformation weights for high accuracy object identification,
    Sheila Tejada, Craig A. Knoblock, and Steven Minton,
    In Proceedings of the Eighth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD-2002), Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 2002.
  - Interactive deduplication using active learning,
    Sunita Sarawagi and Anuradha Bhamidipaty,
    In Proc. of the Eighth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining(KDD-2002), Edmonton, Canada, July 2002.
- Slides:
  - Record Linkage
  - Learning to map between ontologies
    The IJCAI-2001 Workshop on Learning Ontologies , Seattle, WA, August 2001, by Alon Halevy.
  - Data Integration: A "Killer App" for Multi-Strategy Learning
    The 5th Int. Workshop on Multi-Strategy Learning, Portugal, 2000, by Pedro Domingos
Lecture 10: Data Integration
- Readings:
  - Compiling source descriptions for efficient and flexible information integration,
    Jose Luis Ambite, Craig A. Knoblock, Ion Muslea, and Andrew Philpot,
    Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, 16(2):149--187, March 2001.
- Slides:
  - Axiom Compilation
Lecture 11: Data Integration (Continued)
- Readings:
  - Logic-Based Techniques in Data Integration in J. Minker (ed.): "Logic-based Artificial Intelligence", A. Levy.
  - Planning for Information Gathering: A Tutorial Survey,
    E. Lambrecht and S. Kambhampati,
    ASU CSE Tech Report 96-017, May 1997.
- Slides:
  - View Integration

Lecture 12: Data Integration (Continued)

Readings:
- Semi-automatic wrapper generation for Internet information sources
  Naveen Ashish and Craig A. Knoblock
  Proceedings of the Second IFCIS International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems, Kiawah Island, SC, 1997.
- Information Gathering Plans with Sensing Actions
  Naveen Ashish, Craig A. Knoblock, and Alon Levy
  European Conference on Planning, ECP-97, Toulouse, France.
- Flexible and scalable query planning in distributed and heterogeneous environments,
  Jose Luis Ambite and Craig A. Knoblock.
  In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning Systems, Pittsburgh, PA, 1998.
Slides:

Lecture 12: Data Integration (Continued)

Readings:
- Integrating GIS and Imagery through XML-Based Information Mediation,
  Gupta, R. Marciano, I. Zaslavsky and C. Baru,
  Proc. NSF International Workshop on Integrated Spatial Databases: Digital Images and GIS, Portland, Maine, June 1999 (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1737, Springer-Verlag, 211-34.
Slides:
- Geospatial Mediators
- Geospatial Integration Framework