Context-Oriented Information Integration

Context-Oriented Information Integration

Abstract

With critical business information distributed across both structured and unstructured data sources, enterprises are increasingly realizing the importance of seamlessly integrating relevant structured and unstructured data. Existing information integration solutions typically address this issue by providing a single point of access for both structured and unstructured data sources. This is not enough, since the application still needs to formulate the SQL logic to retrieve the needed structured data on one hand, and identify a set of keywords to retrieve the related unstructured data on the other. This is a limitation since (a) the same information need needs to be formulated using two disparate paradigms, which is redundant effort, and (b) in many cases, it is hard (even impossible) for the application to identify appropriate keywords needed as above to retrieve related unstructured data. The SCORE project addresses this limitation by following a novel approach to information integration. In this approach, the application specifies its information needs using only a SQL query on the structured data, and the system automatically \\\”translates\\\” this query into a set of keywords that can be used to retrieve relevant unstructured data. In this talk, we describe the techniques used in SCORE for this query translation, and also present an experimental study that illustrates the effectiveness of these techniques.