Abstract
Most databases contain “name constants” like course numbers, personal names, and place names that correspond to entities in the real world. Previous work in integration of heterogeneous databases has assumed that local name constants can be mapped into an appropriate global domain by normalization. However, in many cases, this assumption does not hold; determining if two name constants should be considered identical can require detailed knowledge of the world, the purpose of the user's query, or both. In this paper, we reject the assumption that global domains can be easily constructed, and assume instead that the names are given in natural language text. We then propose a logic called WHIRL which reasons explicitly about the similarity of local names, as measured using the vector-space model commonly adopted in statistical information retrieval. We describe an efficient implementation of WHIRL and evaluate it experimentally on data extracted from the World Wide Web. We show that WHIRL is much faster than naive inference methods, even for short queries. We also show that inferences made by WHIRL are surprisingly accurate, equaling the accuracy of hand-coded normalization routines on one benchmark problem, and outperforming exact matching with a plausible global domain on a second.
- 1 Serge Abiteboul and Victor Vianu. Regular path queries with constraints. In Proceedings of the Sixteenth A CM SIGA CT- SIGAIOD-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS-97), Tucson, AZ, May 1997. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 2 Yigal Arens, Craig A. Knoblock, and Chun-Nan Hsu. Query processing in the SIMS information mediator. In Austin Tate, editor, Advanced Planning Technology. AAAI Press, Menlo Park, CA, 1996.Google Scholar
- 3 Paolo Atzeni, Giansalvatore Mecca, and Paolo Merialdo. Semistructured and structured data on the Web: going back and forth. In Dan Suciu, editor, Proceedings of the Workshop on Management of Semistructured Data, Tucson, Arizona, May 1997. Available on-line from http://www.research.at t.com / suciu / workshop-papers.html.Google Scholar
- 4 Daniel Barbara, Hector Garcia-Molina, and Daryl Porter. The management of probabilistic data. IEEE Transations on knowledge and data engineering, 4(5):487-501, October 1992. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 5 Brian T. Bartell, Garrison W. Cottrell, and Richard K. Belew. Automatic combination of multiple ranked retrieval systems. In Seventeenth Annual International A CM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 1994. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 6 R. J. Bayardo, W. Bohrer, R. Brice, A. Cichocki, J. Fowler, A. Helal, V. Kashyap, T. Ksiezyk, G. Martin, M. Nodine, M. Rashid, M. Rusinkiewicz, R. Shea, C. Unnikrishan, A. Unruh, and D: Woelk. Infosleuth: an agent-based semantic integration of information in open and dynamic environments. In Proceedings of the 1997 A CM SIGMOD, May 1997. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 7 Justin Boyan, Dane Freitag, and Thorsten Joachims. A machine learning architecture for optimizing web search engines. Technical Report WS-96-05, American Association of Artificial Intelligence, 1994.Google Scholar
- 8 S. Chaudhuri, U. Dayal, and T. 'fan. Join queries with external text sources: execution and optimization techniques. In Proceedings of the 1995 ACM SIGMOD, May 1995. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 9 William W. Cohen. Knowledge integration for structured information sources containing text (extended abstract). In The SIGIR-97 Workshop on Networked Information Retrieval, 1997.Google Scholar
- 10 William W. Cohen. A Web-based information system that reasons with structured collections of text. In Proceedings of Autonomous Agents-98, St. Paul, MN, 1998. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 11 William W. Cohen, Rob Schapire, and Yoram Singer. Learning to order things. To appear in NIPS-97, 1997. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 12 William W. Cohen and Yoram Singer. Context-sensitive learning methods for text categorization, in Proceedings of the 19th Annual International A CM Conference on Research and Development in information Retrieval, pages 307-315, Zurich, Switzerland, 1996. ACM Press. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 13 Oliver M. Duschka and Michael R. Genesereth. Answering recursive queries using views. In Proceedings of the Sixteenth A CM SIGA CT-SIGMOD-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS-97), Tucson, AZ, May 1997. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 14 Oliver M. Duschka and Michael R. Genesereth. Query planning in infomaster. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual A CM Symposium on Applied Computing (SA C97), San Jose, CA, February 1997. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 15 Douglas Fang, Joachim Hammer, and Dennis McLeod. The identification and resolution of semantic heterogeneity in multidatabase systems. In Multidatabase Systems: An Advanced Solution for Global Information Sharing, pages 52- 60. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, California, 1994.Google Scholar
- 16 I. P. Felligi and A. B. Sunter. A theory for record linkage. Journal of the American Statistical Society, 64:1183-1210, 1969.Google ScholarCross Ref
- 17 Thorsten Fiebig, Jurgen Weiss, and Guido Moerkotte. RAW: a relational algebra for the Web. In Dan Suciu, editor, Proceedings of the Workshop on Management of Semistructured Data, Tucson, Arizona, May 1997. Available on-line from http://www.research.att.com/suciu/workshop-papers.html.Google Scholar
- 18 Norbert Fuhr. Probabilistic Datalog~a logic for powerful retrieval methods. In Proceedings of the 1995 A CM SIGIR conference on research in information retrieval, pages 282- 290, New York, 1995. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 19 H. Garcia-Molina, Y. Papakonstantinou, D. Quass, A. Rajaraman, Y. Sagiv, 3. Ullman, and J. Widom. The TSIM- MIS approach to mediation: Data models and languages (extended abstract). In Next Generation Information Technologies and Systems (NGITS-95), Naharia, Israel, November 1995.Google Scholar
- 20 M. Hernandez and S. Stolfo. The merge/purge problem for large databases. In Proceedings of the 1995 A CM SIGMOD, May 1995. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 21 Scott Huffman and David Steier. Heuristic joins to integrate structured heterogeneous data. In Working notes of the AAAI spring symposium on information gathering in heterogeneous distributed environments, Palo Alto, CA, March 1995. AAAI Press.Google Scholar
- 22 B. Kilss and W. Alvey (ed). Record linkage techniques-- 1985. Statistics of Income Division, Internal Revenue Service Publication 1299-2-96. Available from http: / / www.bt s.gov/fcsm / methodology/, 1985.Google Scholar
- 23 Donald E. Knuth. The Art of Computer Programming, Volume I: Fundamental Algorithms (second edition). Addison- Wesley, Reading MA, 1975. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 24 D. Konopnicki and O. Schmueli. W3QS: a query system for the world wide web. In Proceedings of the 21nd International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB-96), Zurich, Switzerland, 1995. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 25 Richard Korf. Linear-space best-first search. Artificial intelligence, 62(1):41-78, July 1993. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 26 Alon Y. Levy, Anand Rajaraman, and Joann J. Ordille. Query answering algorithms for information agents. In Proceedings of the 13th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-96), Portland, Oregon, august 1996. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 27 Alon Y. Levy, Anand Rajaraman, and Joann J. Ordille. Querying heterogeneous information sources using source descriptions. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB-96), Bombay, India, September 1996. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 28 David Lewis. Representation and learning in information retrieval. Technical Report 91-93, Computer Science Dept., University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1992. PhD Thesis. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 29 Alberto Mendelzon and Tovo Milo. Formal models of Web queries. In Proceedings of the Sixteenth A CM SIGACT- SIGMOD-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS-97), Tucson, AZ, May 1997. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 30 A. Monte and C. Elkan. The field-matching problem: algorithm and applications. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, August 1996.Google Scholar
- 31 A. Monte and C. Elkan. An efficient domain-independent algorithm for detecting approximately duplicate database records. In The proceedings of the SIGMOD 1997 workshop on data mining and knowledge discovery, May 1997.Google Scholar
- 32 H. B. Newcombe, J. M. Kennedy, S. J. Axford, and A. P. James. Automatic linkage of vital records. Science, 130:954- 959, 1959.Google ScholarCross Ref
- 33 Nils Nilsson. Principles of Artificial intelligence. Morgan Kaufmann, 1987. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 34 M. F. Porter. An algorithm for suffix stripping. Program, 14(3):130-137, 1980.Google ScholarCross Ref
- 35 J. Ross Quinlan. Learning logical definitions from relations. Machine Learning, 5(3), 1990. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 36 Gerard Salton, editor. Automatic Text Processing. Addison Welsley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1989. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 37 Peter Sch~4uble. SPIDER: A multiuser information retrieval system for semistructured and dynamic data. In Proceedings of the 1993 A CM SIGIR conference on research in information retrieval, pages 318-327, Pittsburgh, PA, 1993. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 38 Dan Suciu. Query decomposition and view maintanance for query languages for unstructured data. in Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB-g6), Bombay, India, 1996. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 39 Dan Suciu, editor. Proceedings of the Workshop on Management of Semistructured Data. Available on-line from http://ww w. research, at t. corn / suciu /workshop-papers.html, Tucson, Arizona, May 1997.Google Scholar
- 40 Anthony Tomasic, Remy Amouroux, Philippe Bonnet, and Olga Kapitskaia. The distributed information search component (Disco) and the World Wide Web. In Proceedings of the 1997 ACM SIGMOD, May 1997. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 41 Howard Turtle and James Flood. Query evaluation: strategies and optimizations. Information processing and management, 31(6):831-850, November 1995. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Integration of heterogeneous databases without common domains using queries based on textual similarity
Recommendations
Integration of heterogeneous databases without common domains using queries based on textual similarity
SIGMOD '98: Proceedings of the 1998 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of dataMost databases contain “name constants” like course numbers, personal names, and place names that correspond to entities in the real world. Previous work in integration of heterogeneous databases has assumed that local name constants can be mapped into ...
Providing database-like access to the Web using queries based on textual similarity
Most databases contain “name constants” like course numbers, personal names, and place names that correspond to entities in the real world. Previous work in integration of heterogeneous databases has assumed that local name constants can be mapped into ...
Providing database-like access to the Web using queries based on textual similarity
SIGMOD '98: Proceedings of the 1998 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of dataMost databases contain “name constants” like course numbers, personal names, and place names that correspond to entities in the real world. Previous work in integration of heterogeneous databases has assumed that local name constants can be mapped into ...
Comments