PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


"Information discovery, extraction and integration for the hidden web"

By

Miss Jiying Wang


Abstract

Currently, web pages returned by filling in search forms are not
indexable to most search engines, since they are dynamically generated
by querying a back-end (relational or object-relational) database.
Referred to as the Deep Web or Hidden Web, the set of such pages is
estimated to be around 500 times the size of the ^surface web^.
Therefore, there arises the need for new information services that can
help users locate information in the hidden web, i.e., to discover the
promising information sources, disseminate the queries, extract the
corresponding results from web pages and integrate the retrieved data.
To minimize user effort in such an information retrieval process and
enable the tools to scale with the growth of the web, we explore the
problem of automatically interacting with information sources in the
hidden web. The problem has four aspects: information discovery,
extraction, understanding and integration. In this proposal, we report
our initial investigations on two of these aspects: the problem of
automatically extracting data objects from a given web site and the
problem of automatically assigning semantic labels to the data.
Furthermore, we propose some future work to address the remaining two
questions: information discovery and integration.


Date:				Thursday, 15 May 2003

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

Venue:				Room 2304
				Lifts 17-18

Committee Members:		Prof. Frederick Lochovsky (Supervisor)
				Prof. Dik-Lun Lee (Chairman)
				Prof. Hongjun Lu
				Dr. Wilfred Ng


**** ALL are Welcome ****