Domain-based Data Integration for Web Databases

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Department of Computer Science and Engineering


PhD Thesis Defence


Title: "Domain-based Data Integration for Web Databases"

By

Mr. Weifeng Su


Abstract

An important part of today's Web is web databases, in which 80% of the
databases are structured databases. To facilitate a user to retrieve
relevant records from different web databases simultaneously, we propose a
simultaneous querying system, called SIM-querying, which is comprised of
three components: query interface integrator, data extractor and result
integrator. In each component, a novel method is presented that performs
its function automatically. In the query interface integrator, a holistic
schema matching method, HSM, is presented that takes advantage of the
attribute occurrence patterns in multiple query interfaces to find the
attributes that match in different interfaces within a domain. In the data
extractor, a domain-based method, ODE, is presented. In ODE, a domain
ontology is first learned from the information overlap and schema matching
in the query results and query interfaces from different web databases
within the domain and the ontology is then used to extract the data
encoded in the result HTML pages automatically. In the result integrator,
a new duplicate detection method, UDD, is presented to identify the
duplicates that exist in the query results from different web databases.
In UDD, a set of negative records is first constructed based on two
observations about the query results of web databases and then, starting
from the negative records, an iterative algorithm identifies the
duplicates from different web databases. Experimental results show that
these novel methods can achieve very high precision individually and
outperform existing methods in the context of web databases.


Date:			Monday, 12 November 2007

Time:			2:00p.m.-4:00p.m.

Venue:			Room 3402
			Lifts 17-18

Chairman:	  	Prof. Sudipto Dasgupta (FINA)

Committee Members:	Prof. Frederick Lochovsky (Supervisor)
	  	  	Prof. Dik-Lun Lee
			Prof. Wilfred Ng
		  	Prof. Jae Yun Moon (ISMT)
		  	Prof. Avigdor Gal (Ind Engg & Mgmt, Technion-Israel
					   Institute of Technology)


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