Next: Introduction
Mixed-Initiative, Multi-Source Information Assistants
Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).
WWW10, May 1-5, 2001, Hong Kong
ACM 1-58113-348-0/01/0005.
Abstract:
While the information resources on the Web are vast, the sources are
often hard to find, painful to use, and difficult to integrate. We
have developed the Heracles framework for building Web-based
information assistants. This framework provides the infrastructure to
rapidly construct new applications that extract information from
multiple Web sources and interactively integrate the data using a
dynamic, hierarchical constraint network. This paper describes the
core technologies that comprise the framework, including information
extraction, hierarchical template representation, and constraint
propagation. In addition, we present an application of this
framework, the Travel Assistant, which is an interactive travel
planning system. We also briefly describe our experience using the
same framework to build a second application, the WorldInfo Assistant,
which extracts and integrates geographic-related data about countries
thorughout the world. We believe these types of information
assistants provide a significant step forward in fully exploiting the
information available on the Internet.
(*) Mailing address:
Univ. of Southern California
Information Sciences Institute
4676 Admiralty Way,
Marina del Rey,
CA 90292-6601, USA
Next: Introduction
Jose-Luis Ambite
2001-02-17