A Knowledge-Based Approach for Selecting Information Sources

Through the Internet and the World-Wide Web, a vast number of information sources has become available, which offer information on various subjects by different providers, often in heterogeneous formats. This calls for tools and methods for building an advanced informationprocessing infrastructure. One issue in this area is the selection of suitable information sources in query answering. In this paper, we present a knowledge-based approach to this problem, in the setting where one among a set of information sources (prototypically, data repositories) should be selected for evaluating a user query. We use extended logic programs (ELPs) to represent rich descriptions of the information sources, an underlying domain theory, and user queries in a formal query language (here, XML-QL, but other languages can be handled as well). Moreover, we use ELPs for declarative query analysis and generation of a query description. Central to our approach are declarative source-selection programs, for ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Thomas Eiter, Michael Fink, Hans Tompits
• Keywords: Advanced Informationprocessing Infrastructure, CORR 2006, Education, Formal Query Language, Information Sources