INTEGRATION OF INFORMATION FROM HETEROGENOUS SOURCES

MUCH INFORMATION IS PUBLISHED AND STORED ON NATIONAL NETWORKS IN THE FORM OF ELECTRONIC DOCUMENTS. CURRENT INDEXING TECHNOLOGY DOES NOT EFFECTIVELY EXTRACT THE CONTENTS OF THESE DOCUMENTS. AS A RESULT, PEOPLE CANNOT EASILY FIND SOURCE DOCUMENTS THEY NEED. WE PLAN TO DEVELOP A SYSTEM WHICH WILL EXTRACT KEY INFORMATION FROM DOCUMENTS AND INDEX IT PRECISELY WITH MINIMUM DATA LOSS, WHILE ALLOWING USERS TO CONTINUE SUBMITTING DOCUMENTS IN THE FORMAT AND STRUCTURE OF THEIR CHOICE. OUR METHOD WILL SUPPORT MULTIPLE FORMATS, ALLOWING FOR CUSTOMIZATION AND EVOLUTION OVER TIME. IN PHASE I WE WILL DEMONSTRATE THIS TECHNIQUE BY ANALYZING AND EXTRACTING DATA FROM COMPLEX TWO-DIMENTIONAL TABLES. IN PHASE II WE WILL EXTEND THIS APPROACH TO HETEROGENEOUS COLLECTIONS OF DOCUMENTS. ANTICIPATED BENEFITS: WE BELIEVE THIS APPROACH WILL MAKE DOCUMENTS MORE ACCESSIBLE ON COMPUTER NETWORKS. CONTENTS OF ELECTRONIC DOCUMENTS WILL BE PRECISELY INDEXED, AND NETWORK USERS WILL BE ABLE TO GENERATE PRECISE QUERIES TO LOCATE INFORMATION. IN ADDITION, THIS TECHNIQUE WILL IMPROVE INFORMATION-INPUT CAPABILITY OF GENERAL INFORMATION RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS. TODAY THESE SYSTEMS FACE SIMILAR PROBLEMS IN INDEXING AND INTEGRATING HETEROGENEOUS DOCUMENT INPUT.