Understanding Web Data Sources for Search and Exploration

Alessandro Bozzon, Marco Brambilla, Stefano Ceri, Emanuele Della Valle, Silvia Quarteroni

Abstract: As information sources become increasingly available on the Internet, searching and extracting information from them is getting more important. We present a data model and a general service framework for supporting search and exploration of heterogeneous data sources. In our approach, concepts and abstractions find suitable and efficient implementations. In this paper, we especially focus on the support of dynamicity and flexibility offered by our framework, from the definition of data sources to the interaction options offered to users when expressing queries and interacting with results.