PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2014, Engineering and Applied Science: Computer Science and Engineering

With the continuing explosive growth of the world wide web, a wealth of information has become available online. The web has become one of the major sources of information for both individual users and large organizations. To find the information, individual users can either use search engines or navigate to a particular website following links. The former method returns links to vast amounts of data in seconds while the latter one could be tedious and time consuming. The presentation of results using the former method is usually a web page with links to actual web data sources (or websites). The latter method takes the user to the actual web data source itself. Using the two most popular forms of web data presentation/retrieval, web data can hardly be queried, manipulated and analyzed easily even though it is publicly and readily available. Many companies also use web for information whose challenge is to build web-based analytical and decision support systems, often referred to as web data warehouses. However, the information present on the web is extremely complex and heterogeneous which brings along with it a challenge in integrating and presenting retrieved web data in a uniform format. Hence, there is a need for different web data integration frameworks that can integrate and present web data in a uniform format. To achieve a homogeneous representation of web data we need a framework that extracts relevant structured and semi-structured web data from different web data sources, generates schemas from structured as well as semi-structured web data, and integrates schemas generated from different structured and semi-structured web data sources into a merged schema, populates it with data and presents it to the end user in a uniform format. We propose a modular framework for homogeneous presentation of web data. This framework consists of different standalone modules that can also be used to create independent systems that solve other schema unification problem (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Karen Davis Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Raj Bhatnagar Ph.D. (Committee Member); Hsiang-Li Chiang Ph.D. (Committee Member); Ali Minai Ph.D. (Committee Member); Carla Purdy Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Computer Science