Building Data Integration Systems via Mass Collaboration
Robert McCann, AnHai Doan, Vanitha Varadarajan, Alexander Kramnik · 2003
Building data integration systems today is largely done by hand, in a very labor-intensive and error-prone process. In this paper we describe a conceptually new solution to this problem: thatof mass collaboration. The basic idea is to think about a data integration system as having a finite set of parameters whose values must be set. To build such a system the system administrators construct and deploy a system "shell", then ask the users to help the system "automatically converge" to the correct parameter values. This way the enormous burden of system development is lif ted fA( the administrators and spread "thinly" over a multitude of users. We describe our current e#ort in applying this approach to the problem of schema matching in the context of data integration. We present experiments with both real and synthetic users that show the promise of the approach. Finally we discuss thef uture work, challenges, and the potential applicationsof the approach beyond the data integration context.