Mixed-initiative, multi-source information assistants
Craig A. Knoblock, Steven Minton, José Luis Ambite, Maria Muslea, Jean Oh, Martin R. Frank · 2001
While the information resources on the Web are vast, the sources are often hard to nd, painful to use, and dicult to integrate. Wehavedeveloped 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 ###### #########, which is an interactivetravel planning system. We also briey describe our experience using the same framework to build a second application, the ######### #########, which extracts and integrates geographic-related data about countries thorughout the world. We believe these types of information assistants provide a signicant step forward in fully exploiting the information available on the Internet. 1.