• Tutorial 1

• Tutorial 2 

Searching from Distributed Heterogeneous Text Sources
Weiyi Meng, SUNY at Binghamton, USA

The goal of the tutorial is to explain principles of Web-enabled systems and provide basic understanding of software concepts, techniques and architectures needed for integrating new or existing applications into Web-based distributed framework.  The tutorial addresses a number of issues related to Web enabling technology like client/server model, basic Web principles (http server properties, protocols, HTML-to-JavaScript and Java integration), dynamic collaboration, code migration, Java's advanced networking features and multi-tier middleware architectures.  Each concept will be illustrated with concrete examples, gradually constructing a case study that shows how to implement Web enabled application.  A number of demonstrator will be shown to illustrate distribute active and dynamic features of Web-enabled systems.

Expected Audience

The tutorial is suitable for system designers, teachers, researchers and students who want to gain better understanding of the design and development of Web-enabled systems, as well as for managers and others who want to get better insight in possibilities offered by the Web technology.  No specific technical expertise is required, as the tutorial focuses on design issues covering principles rather than implementation details.

Presenter's Profile

Nikola Serbedzija is a professor at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.  His major research interest is the design of parallel and distributed systems for dedicated use in different application domains.  He is the principal designer of the GoWeb system, an active middleware for enabling computing resources for the use within WWW.  He has been lecturing Web-based techniques at School of Computing Sciences, UTS and Technical University Berlin and he held a number of tutorials and special seminars on the Web related topics.

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Introduction

Many text sources are available in the Internet. Each text source usually has an associated search engine.  These widely distributed search engines are highly heterogeneous.  They may employ different techniques to represent and rank documents, and they usually provide access to different sets of documents of diverse interest.  Frequently, a user's information needs are stored in the databases of multiple local search engines.  As the number of search engines increases, there is an increasing need for automatic search brokers (metasearch engines) which can invoke multiple search engines as it is inconvenient and inefficient for an ordinary user to utilize multiple search engines and identify useful documents from the results returned from multiple search engines.  Through a search broker, only a single query is needed from a user to retrieve desired documents.

This tutorial is to provide an overview of proposed methods for searching documents from distributed heterogeneous text sources.  A quick review of web based search engines will be given.  The tutorial will mainly focus on different proposed solutions to two challenges in building effective and efficient metasearch engines.  The first challenge is Database Selection - the identification of search engines that are likely to return useful results to a given query.  The second challenge is Collection Fusion - the determination of which documents should be retrieved from each identified search engine and how to merge results from multiple search engines into a single ranked list.  The tutorial will also point out some problems that need to be further investigated.

Presenter's Profile

Weiyi Meng is currently an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the State University of New York at Binghamton, USA.  His main research areas are Internet-based Information Retrieval and Multidatabase Query Processing.  He is a co-author of the book "Principles of Database Query Processing for Advanced Applications" published by Morgan Kaufmann in 1998.  He has published over 40 papers in leading journals and major conference proceedings.  He has served/is serving as a program committee member (including as program chair) in a number of international conferences.