Abstract

The Internet provides access to a wealth of information. For any given topic or application domain there are a variety of available information sources. However, current systems, such as search engines or topic directories in the World Wide Web, offer only very limited capabilities for locating, combining, and organizing information. Mediators, systems that provide integrated access and database-like query capabilities to information distributed over heterogeneous sources, are critical to realize the full potential of meaningful access to networked information. Query planning, the task of generating a cost-efficient plan that computes a user query from the relevant information sources, is central to mediator systems. However, query planning is a computationally hard problem due to the large number of possible sources and possible orderings on the operations to process the data. Moreover, the choice of sources, data …

Date

April 1, 2000

Authors

José Luis Ambite, Craig A Knoblock

Journal

Artificial Intelligence

Volume

118

Issue

1-2

Pages

115-161

Publisher

Elsevier