Instructor: Craig Knoblock
Meeting Time: Tuesdays 2 - 4:50pm
Location: THH 208
Office Hours:
    Tuesdays 5-6pm (PHE 416)
    Thursdays 3-4pm (ISI 922)
Teaching Assistant: Martin Michalowski
TA Office Hours:
    Mondays 1-2:30pm (SAL 200C)
Teaching Assistant: Anshuman Chakravartty
TA Office Hours:
    Tuesday 11-12:30pm (SAL 200C)
    Wednesdays 1-2:30pm (SAL 200C)
    Thursday 10-11:30am (SAL 200C)
    Friday 2-3:30pm (SAL 200C)
Grader: Junaid Chaudhry

This course will focus on the basic foundations and techniques in Information Extraction and Integration. There has been a great deal of interest and research over the last few years on this topic and the course will cover the research and tools for addressing the technical problems. The topics covered will include structured data querying (Xquery), view integration techniques, machine learning techniques for turning web sites into structured data sources, high-performance query execution systems based on streaming dataflow, constraint-based integration systems, and approaches to resolving naming inconsistencies across sites. We will also cover applications of information integration to geospatial and biological data integration.

The class will be run as a lecture course with lots student participation and hands-on experience. As an integral part of the course each student will develop and build their own integrated Web application or related research project using the research and tools covered in the class.

Course Syllabus and Schedule

• Lecture 1 (January 11)
• Topic: Introduction
• Introduction
• Overview of the course
• Xquery
• Required Readings
• What is XQuery ?
  Per Bothner.
• XQuery: A Guided Tour
  Chapter 1 of XQuery from the Experts: A Guide to the W3C XML Query Language
  Howard Katz (ed), Addison-Wesley, San Francisco, CA, 2004
• Recommended Readings
• XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language
• Slides
  • Introduction
  • Xquery


• Lecture 2 (January 18)
• Topic: Wrapper Learning
• Wrapper Learning and Maintenance
• Agent Builder (Martin Michalowski)
• Homework
• Assignment 1 Due (January 19 at midnight)
• Xquery
• Required Readings
• Accurately and reliably extracting data from the web: A machine learning approach,
  Craig A. Knoblock, Kristina Lerman, Steven Minton, and Ion Muslea.
  In Piotr S. Szczepaniak, Javier Segovia, Janusz Kacprzyk, and Lotfi A. Zadeh, editors, Intelligent Exploration of the Web, pages 275--287. Springer-Verlag, Berkeley, CA, 2003.
• 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.
• Wrapper Induction for Information Extraction.
  Kushmerick, N., Weld, D., & Doorenbos, B. (1997), IJCAI-97
• Recommended 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.
• Wrapper induction: Efficiency and expressiveness. Nicholas Kushmerick
  Artificial Intelligence J.(1-2):15-68 (special issue on Intelligent Internet Systems).
• Wrapper maintenance: A machine learning approach
  Kristina Lerman, Steven Minton, and Craig A. Knoblock.
  Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 2003.
• Slides
  • Wrapper Learning
  • Agent Builder


• Lecture 3 (January 25)
• Topic: Wrapper Generation
• Automatic Wrapper Generation
• Advanced Agent Builder (Martin Michalowski)
• Homework
• Assignment 2 Due (January 26 at midnight)
• Wrapper Building
• Required 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
• Recommended Readings
• Extracting Structured Data from Web Pages
  Arvind Arasu, Hector Garcia-Molina SIGMOD 2003, San Diego, CA, June 2003.
• Slides
  • Wrapper Generation
  • Advanced Agent Builder


• Lecture 4 (February 1)
• Topic: Dataflow Execution
• Streaming Dataflow Execution
• Theseus Agent Execution System (Dr. Greg Barish)
• Homework
• Assignment 3 Due (Feb 2 at midnight)
• Advanced Wrapper Building
• Required Readings:
  • An Expressive and Efficient Execution System for Software Agents
    Greg Barish, and Craig A. Knoblock.
    Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, To Appear.
  • 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


• Lecture 5 (February 8)
• Topic: Data Integration
• Data Integration
• Prometheus mediator (Snehal Thakkar)
• Homework
• Assignment 4 Due (Feb 9 at midnight)
• Execution Plans
• Required Readings:
  • Logic-Based Techniques in Data Integration in J. Minker (ed.): "Logic-based Artificial Intelligence", A. Levy.
  • A view integration approach to dynamic composition of web services,
    Snehal Thakkar, Jose-Luis Ambite, and Craig A. Knoblock.
    In Proceedings of 2003 ICAPS Workshop on Planning for Web Services, Trento, Italy, 2003.
• Recommended Readings
• Planning for Information Gathering: A Tutorial Survey,
  E. Lambrecht and S. Kambhampati,
  ASU CSE Tech Report 96-017, May 1997.
• Slides
  • Data Integration
  • Prometheus Mediator


• Lecture 6 (February 15)
• Topics: Semantic Web and Optimizing Data Integration
• The Semantic Web (Prof. Yolanda Gil)
• Optimizing Integration Plans (Dr. Jose Luis Ambite)
• Homework
• Assignment 5 Due (Feb 16 at midnight)
• Mediator Integration
• Required Readings:
  • Semantic Web
    By Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila
    Scientific American, May 2001 issue
  • Reviewing the design of DAML+OIL: An ontology language for the semantic web.
    A Ian Horrocks, Peter F. Patel-Schneider, and Frank van Harmelen.
    In Proc. of the 18th Nat. Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2002), pages 792-797. AAAI Press, 2002.
  • Automatic Composition of Aggregation Workflows for Transportation Modeling
    Jose Luis Ambite and Matthew Weathers.
    Submitted to The 6th Annual National Conference on Digital Government Research, Atlanta, Georgia, 2005.
• Recommended Readings
See the web site http://www.disobey.com/detergent/2002/sw123/ for a great list of suggested readings on the semantic web.
• Slides
  • Dr. Gil's Lecture slides
  • Dr. Ambite's slides


• Lecture 7 (February 22)
• Topic: Constraint Integration
• Constraint Integration
• Heracles Constraint Integration System (Dr. Jose Luis Ambite)
• Homework
• Assignment 6 Due (Feb 23 at midnight)
• Data integration using servlets
• Required Readings:
  • Heracles II: Conditional Constraint Networks for Interleaved Planning and Information Gathering,
    Jose Luis Ambite, Craig A. Knoblock, Maria Muslea, and Steve Minton
    IEEE Intelligence Systems, 2005
  • Smart Clients: Constraint Satisfaction as a Paradigm for Scaleable Intelligent Information Systems
    Marc Torrens, Boi Faltings and Pearl Pu.
    Constraints, Special issue on Constraints and Agents, pages. 49-69, International Journal of Constraints, Volume 7, Issue 1. Kluwer Academic Publishers. January 2002.
• Slides
  • Constraint Integration Slides


• Lecture 8 (March 1)
• Topic: Record Linkage
• Record Linkage
• Apollo record linkage (Martin Michalowski)
• Homework
• Assignment 7 Due (March 2 at midnight)
• Constraint Integration in Heracles
• Project Proposals Due (March 1 at 1:50pm)
• Required Readings:
  • 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.
  • Adaptive Duplicate Detection Using Learnable String Similarity Measures.
    Mikhail Bilenko and Raymond J. Mooney.
    In Proceedings of the Ninth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD-2003), pp.39-48, Washington, DC, August 2003.
• Slides
  • Record Linkage


• Lecture 9 (March 8)
• Topics: Ontology Matching and Source Modeling
• Ontology Matching
• Automatic Source Modeling
• Homework
• Assignment 8 Due (March 9 at midnight)
• Record Linkage
• Required Reading:
  • Semantic annotation of unstructured and ungrammatical text Matthew Michelson and Craig A. Knoblock, Proceedings of the Dagstuhl workshop on Machine Learning for the Semantic Web, February 2005.
  • Biomedical Named Entity Regognition Using Conditional Random Fields and Rich Feature Sets Burr Settles, Proceedings of the COLING 2004 International Joint Workshop on Natural Language Processing in Biomedicine and its Applications (NLPBA), Geneva, Switzerland, 2004
  • (LP)2, an Adaptive Algorithm for Information Extraction from Web-related Texts Fabio Ciravegna, Proceedings of the IJCAI-2001 Workshop on Adaptive Text Extraction and Mining, Seattle, WA, 2001
• Recommended Readings
• Information Extraction Jim Cowie and Wendy Lehnert, Communications of the ACM, 39(1), January 1996
• Slides
  • LP2
  • Phoebus
  • IE Ovewview
  • Using Amilcare


• Spring Break (March 15)


• Lecture 10 (March 22)
• Topics: Information Extraction and Web Mining
• Information Extraction
• Mining the Web (Rattapoom Tuchinda)
• Required Readings:
  • 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.
  • Ontology Matching: A Machine Learning Approach, A. Doan, J. Madhavan, P. Domingos, and A. Halevy. Handbook on Ontologies in Information Systems, S. Staab and R. Studer (eds.), Springer-Velag, 2004. Invited paper. Pages 397-416.
• Slides
  • Ontology Matching
  • Source Modeling


• Lecture 11 (March 29)
• Topics: Optimizing Streaming Dataflow
• Optimizing Streaming Dataflow
• Speculative Execution (Dr. Greg Barish)
• Required 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.
  • Learning value predictors for the speculative execution of information gathering plans,
    Greg Barish and Craig A. Knoblock.
    In Proceedings of the 18th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-2003), Acapulco, Mexico, 2003.
  • 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.
• Slides
  • Speculative Execution
  • Adaptive Query Processing


• Lecture 12 (April 5)
• Topics: Optimizing Data Integration
• Interleaving Planning and Sensing
• Compiling Integration Plans
• Required Reading
  • Introduction to Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 3rd Edition,Two Crows Corporation
  • 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
  • Data Mining


• Lecture 13 (April 12)
• Topic: Geospatial Data Integration
• Geospatial information mediators
• Geospatial data fusion
• Geospatial reasoning (Martin Michalowski)
• Required Readings:
  • Utilizing road network data for automatic identification of road intersections from high resolution color orthoimagery,
    Ching-Chien Chen, Cyrus Shahabi, and Craig A. Knoblock.
    In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Spatio-Temporal Database Management - STDBM'04, 2004.
  • Automatically and accurately conflating orthoimagery and street maps,
    Ching-Chien Chen, Craig A. Knoblock, Cyrus Shahabi, Snehal Thakkar, and Yao-Yi Chiang.
    In Proceedings of the 12th ACM International Symposium on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM-GIS'04), 2004.
  • Exploiting online sources to accurately geocode addresses,
    Rahul Bakshi, Craig A. Knoblock, and Snehal Thakkar.
    In Proceedings of the 12th ACM International Symposium on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM-GIS'04), 2004.
  • Query processing in a geographic mediation system,
    Mehdi Essid, Omar Boucelma, François-Marie Colonna, and Yassine Lassoued.
    In Proceedings of the 12th ACM International Symposium on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM-GIS'04), 2004.
• Slides
  • Geospatial Integration


• Project Presentations (April 19)


• Project Presentations (April 26)


• Final Exam (Tuesday, May 3, 2-4pm)
• Location: TBD