Building a Planner for Information Gathering: A Report from the Trenches

Informationgathering requires locating and integrating data froma set of distributed informationsources. These sources maycontain overlapping data and can comefrom different types of sources, including traditional databases, knowledgebases, programs, and Webpages. In this paper we focus on the problem of howto apply a general-purpose planner to produce plans for informationgathering. Weidentify the critical functionality of the basic planner, describe howthe information gathering problemcan be cast as a planning problem,and present our approachto efficiently generating high-quality plans in this application domain. Theresulting information gathering planner is used as the query processor in the SIMSinformation mediator, whichis being applied to provide access to data for transportation logistics and traumacare. We present empirical results in the transportation domain to demonstratethat this planner can efficiently produceinformation gathering plans on a set of example queries that we...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1996
• Where: AIPS
• Authors: Craig A. Knoblock
• Keywords: AIPS 1996, Artificial Intelligence, Information Gathering, Information Gathering Planner, Planner