356471
Automatic integration of Web search interfaces with WISE-Integrator
Abstract.An increasing number of databases are becoming Web accessible through form-based search interfaces, and many of these sources are database-driven e-commerce sites. It is a daunting task for users to access numerous Web sites individually to get the desired information. Hence, providing a unified access to multiple e-commerce search engines selling similar products is of great importance in allowing users to search and compare products from multiple sites with ease. One key task for providing such a capability is to integrate the Web search interfaces of these e-commerce search engines so that user queries can be submitted against the integrated interface. Currently, integrating such search interfaces is carried out either manually or semiautomatically, which is inefficient and difficult to maintain. In this paper, we present WISE-Integrator - a tool that performs automatic integration of Web Interfaces of Search Engines. WISE-Integrator explores a rich set of special metainformation that exists in Web search interfaces and uses the information to identify matching attributes from different search interfaces for integration. It also resolves domain differences of matching attributes. In this paper, we also discuss how to automatically extract information from search interfaces that is needed by WISE-Integrator to perform automatic interface integration. Our experimental results, based on 143 real-world search interfaces in four different domains, indicate that WISE-Integrator can achieve high attribute matching accuracy and can produce high-quality integrated search interfaces without human interactions.
2888926
AllInOneNews: development and evaluation of a large-scale news metasearch engine
AllInOneNews is the largest news metasearch engine in the world, connecting to over 1,000 news sites over 150 countries. Implementing a large-scale metasearch engine like AllInOneNews needs to overcome unique challenges not faced by building small metasearch engines such as developing highly scalable search engine selection techniques. In this paper, we discuss these unique challenges and our solutions to these challenges. We also discuss some novel features of AllInOneNews such as highly automated solution and semantic query match. This paper also reports the results of a comparative evaluation of three commercial news search systems, one search engine - Google News and two metasearch engines - Mamma News and AllInOneNews. Several measures such as effectiveness, diversity and time-sensitivity are used to perform the comparison. Another contribution of this paper is that we introduce a novel scheme to compare multiple news search systems in a combined measure that takes both relevance and time-sensitivity of retrieved information into consideration.
3399913
WISE-Integrator: A System for Extracting and Integrating Complex Web Search Interfaces of the Deep Web
We demonstrate WISE-Integrator - an automatic search interface extraction and integration tool. The basic research issues behind this tool will also be explained.
9755561
A Treemap-Based Result Interface for Search Engine Users
Search engines and metasearch engines on the World Wide Web typically display representative information such as the result document titles and snippets in a one-dimensional ranked list. Alternatively, a few others such as Clusty and Kartoo cluster their results so that users can, to a certain extent, interact with documents, keywords and/or clusters. The number of documents that can be effectively presented in one screen is usually limited to between 10 and 20. In this paper, we propose a method based on treemap visualization that substantially improve the information compactness. In addition, it provides a few unique post-search interaction methods that enable a user to manage a large number of results. An online prototype system is built. Various experiments are designed and done to evaluate the efficiency, effectiveness and usability.
957553
A highly scalable and effective method for metasearch
A metasearch engine is a system that supports unified access to multiple local search engines. Database selection is one of the main challenges in building a large-scale metasearch engine. The problem is to efficiently and accurately determine a small number of potentially useful local search engines to invoke for each user query. In order to enable accurate selection, metadata that reflect the contents of each search engine need to be collected and used. This article proposes a highly scalable and accurate database selection method. This method has several novel features. First, the metadata for representing the contents of all search engines are organized into a single integrated representative. Such a representative yields both computational efficiency and storage efficiency. Second, the new selection method is based on a theory for ranking search engines optimally. Experimental results indicate that this new method is very effective. An operational prototype system has been built based on the proposed approach.
16923777
Identifying redundant search engines in a very large scale metasearch engine context
For a given set of search engines, a search engine is redundant if its searchable contents can be found from other search engines in this set. In this paper, we propose a method to identify redundant search engines in a very large-scale metasearch engine context. The general problem is equivalent to an NP hard problem -- the set-covering problem. Due to the large number of search engines that need to be considered and the large sizes of these search engines, approximate solutions must be developed. In this paper, we propose a general methodology to tackle this problem and within the context of this methodology, we propose several new heuristic algorithms for solving the set-covering problem.
207751
PIDD: database for Protein Inter-atomic Distance Distributions
Protein Inter-atomic Distance Distributions (PIDD) is a dedicated database and structural bio-informatics system for distance based protein modeling. The database is developed to host and analyze the statistical data for protein inter-atomic distances based on their distributions in databases of known protein structures such as in the Protein Data Bank (PDB). PIDD is capable of generating, caching, and displaying the statistical distributions of the distances of various types and ranges. The collected information can be used to extract geometric restraints or mean-force potentials for protein structure determination including nuclear magnetic resonance structure determination and comparative model refinement. PIDD is supported with a friendly designed web interface so that users can easily specify the distance types and ranges, and retrieve, visualize or download the distributions of the distances as they desire. PIDD is freely accessible at
12670883
On Hadamard-Type Output Coding in Multiclass Learning
The error-correcting output coding (ECOC) method reduces the multiclass learning problem into a series of binary classifiers. In this paper, we consider the dense ECOC methods, combining an economical number of base learners. Under the criteria of row separation and column diversity, we suggest the use of Hadamard matrices to design output codes and show them better than other codes of the same size. Comparative experiments based on the support vector machines are made for some real datasets from the UCI machine learning repository.
9180158
Protocol Design of MPEG-4 Media Delivery with Active Networks
Traditionally, the Internet supports best effort service. The quality of service available to real time applications such as the delivery of video and audio is therefore difficult to predict and control. Two new technologies have emerged recently, namely the MPEG-4 standard and active network, for media data compression and data networking, respectively. MPEG-4 uses a content or object-based representation. It supports object-based scalability and, in particular, it allows the modification or editing of objects without having to first decode them. Active network allows program code to be loaded dynamically into network nodes. In this paper, we describe a system for real-time media delivery that exploits the strengths of MPEG-4 media encoding and active networks. It is based on a best-effort transport service. Our system performs congestion avoidance, error concealment, and media scalability.
44526903
Hamiltonicity, neighborhood intersections and the partially square graphs
Abstract Let G be a graph. The partially square graph G ∗ of G is a graph obtained from G by adding edges uv satisfying the conditions uv∉E(G), and there is some w∈N(u)∩N(v), such that N(w)⊆N(u)∪N(v)∪{u,v}. A non-negative rational sequence (a 1 ,a 2 ,…,a k+1 ) is called an LTW-sequence if the following conditions are satisfied: (1) a 1 ⩽1; (2) for arbitrary i 1 ,i 2 ,…,i h ∈{2,3,…,k+1},∑ j=1 h i j ⩽k+1 implies ∑ j=1 h (a i j −1)⩽1 . In this paper, we will use the technique of the vertex insertion on l -connected ( l=k,k−1 or k+1,k⩾2 ) graphs to provide a unified proof for G to be hamiltonian, traceable, 1 -hamiltonian or hamiltonian-connected, the sufficient conditions are expressed by weighted sums of the neighborhood intersections in G of independent sets in G ∗ , where the weights are LTW-sequences.
17480069
Similarity-based Web service matchmaking
With the increasing growth in popularity of Web services, matchmaking of relevant Web services becomes a significant challenge. Commonly, Web service is described by WSDL and published on UDDI registers. UDDI provides limited search facilities allowing only a keyword-based search of businesses, services, and the so called tModels based on names and identifiers. This category-based keyword-browsing method is clearly insufficient. Semantic Web service uses DAML-S instead of WSDL to represent capabilities of Web services. This improvement enables software agents or search engines to automatically find appropriate Web services via ontologies and reasoning algorithm enriched methods. However, the high cost of formally defining to the heavy and complicated services makes this improvement widespread adoption unlikely. To cope with these limitations, we have developed a suite of methods which assesses the similarity of Web services to achieve matchmaking. In particular, we present a conceptual model which classifies properties of Web services into four categories. For each category, a similarity assessment method has been given. In Web service matchmaking process, these similarity assessment methods can be used together or individually. Experiments highlight complementary contributions that our work makes to facilitate Web service matchmaking.