BTW 2003
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deutsch Invited Speakers
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 Alon Halevy, University of Washington (Seattle):
"Data Integration: A Status Report"

Abstract: Integration of data from multiple sources is one of the longest standing problems facing the database research community. In addition to being a problem in most large enterprises, research on this topic has been fueled by the promise of integrating data on the WWW. In the past few years, the community has made very significant progress on data integration, from the conceptual and algorithmic aspects, to the systems and product aspects. I will begin this talk by briefly highlighting the recent major achievements. Then, I will discuss what I consider to be the major challenges that lie ahead of us, focusing on peer-data management systems and semi-automatic schema mappings. Peer-data management systems (PDMS) offer a flexible architecture for sharing data. Instead of requiring the participants to create a central mediated schema, they can interoperate by specifying local semantic mappings, and queries can be answered by chaining mappings. I will discuss the challenges faced in building PDMS, and describe some of the solutions we employ in the Piazza PDMS at the University of Washington. I will then discuss some recent work on semi-automatic schema matching, and how this area has benefited from the fruitful combination of Machine Learning and Database techniques. Finally, I will touch upon what I consider to be the most significant obstacle to to achieving widespread data integration in the long run, namely, the conceptual difficulty of authoring, querying and sharing structured data.

About the speaker: Dr. Alon Halevy received his Bachelors degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1988, and his Ph.D in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1993. From 1993 to 1997, Dr. Halevy was a principal member of technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, and then at AT&T Laboratories. He joined the faculty of the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Washington in 1998. Dr. Halevy's research interests are in data integration, management of XML data, web-site management, peer-data management systems, query optimization, database theory, knowledge representation, and more generally, the the intersection between Database and AI technologies. His research developed several systems, such as the Information Manifold data integration system, the Strudel web-site management system, and the Tukwila XML data integration system. He was also a co-developer of XML-QL, which later contributed to the development of XQuery standard for querying XML data. In 1999, Dr. Halevy co-founded Nimble Technology, whose product is a data integration system based on XML. Dr. Halevy was a Sloan Fellow (1999-2000), and received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2000. He serves on the editorial boards of the VLDB Journal, the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, and is currently serving as the program chair for the ACM SIGMOD 2003 Conference.