The explosive growth and popularity of the world-wide web has resulted in a huge number of information sources on the Internet and the promise of unprecedented information-gathering capabilities to lay users. Unfortunately, the promise has not yet been transformed into reality. While there are sources relevant to virtually any user's query, the morass of sources presents a formidable hurdle to effectively accessing the information. One way of alleviating this problem is to develop web-based information integration systems or agents, which take a user's query or request (e.g., monitor a site), and access the relevant sources or services to efficiently support the request.

The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers that are working in a variety of areas that are all related to the larger problem of integrating information on the Web. This includes research in the areas of machine learning, data mining, automatic planning, constraint reasoning, databases, view integration, information extraction, semantic web, web services, and other related areas.

The proposed workshop will focus on the wide variety of research problems that relate to the problem of web-based information integration. These topics include, but are not limited to:

• Information extraction
• Wrapper learning
• Automatic wrapper generation
• Information gathering
• Source descriptions
• Source meta-data learning
• Source statistics learning
• Web service composition
• Record linkage/object consolidation
• Ontology matching
• Novel integration architectures
• Answering queries using views
• Inter-schema mediation architectures
• Data mining for integration
• Web-based query planning and optimization
• Query execution
• Applications

This is a 2-day workshop that will be held on August 9-10, 2003. The workshop will consist of a combination of paper presentations, posters, panels, invited talks and discussion sessions.

Submission Instructions

If you would like to participate in the workshop, please submit a paper (3-6 pages) or abstract (1 page) using the standard AAAI/IJCAI paper formatting. Please submit papers in PDF and send them directly to [email protected]. If your paper is larger than one megabyte, please place the file on an http site and send a pointer to the file.

Note: Participants are expected to register for the main IJCAI conference in addition to the workshop.

Important Dates and Deadlines

• Deadline for the submission of full papers (3-6 pages) or abstracts (1 page): March 7, 2003.
• Notification of acceptance/rejection: March 28, 2003.
• Deadline for the receipt of camera-ready papers: May 9, 2003.

Organizing Committee

Prof. Craig Knoblock (Co-Chair)
Information Sciences Institute
University of Southern California
4676 Admiralty Way, Marina del Rey, CA 90292
[email protected]
http://www.isi.edu/~knoblock

Prof. Subbarao Kambhampati (Co-Chair)
Department of Computer Science
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ, 85287
[email protected]
http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/rao.html

Prof. Lise Getoor
Department of Computer Science
University of Maryland
College Park, MD
[email protected]
http://www.cs.umd.edu/~getoor/

Prof. Alon Halevy
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Washinton
Seattle, WA
[email protected]
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/alon/

Dr. Sheila McIlraith
Knowledge Systems Lab
Department of Computer Science
Stanford University
Stanford, CA
[email protected]
http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/people/sam/

Program Committee

William Cohen, Carnegie Mellon University

Hasan Davulcu, Arizona State University

Anhai Doan, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Juliana Freire, Oregon Graduate Institute

C. Lee Giles, Pennsylvania State University

Joseph M. Hellerstein, University of California, Berkeley

Nick Kushmerick, University College Dublin

Andrew McCallum, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Giansalvatore Mecca, Università della Basilicata

Renee Miller, University of Toronto

Ami Motro, George Mason University

Jeffrey Naughton, University of Wisconsin

Louiqa Raschid, University of Maryland

Marie-Christine Rousset, University of Paris-Sud

Sheila Tejada, University of New Orleans