In this paper, we report our initial investigations on the problems of automatically extracting data objects from a given hidden-web source (i.e., the web site with an HTML search form) and automatically assigning semantics to the extracted data. We also propose some future work to address the problem of information discovery and integration for hidden-web sources.

Today’s search engines are increasingly required to broaden their capabilities beyond free-text search. More complex features, such as supporting range constraints over numeric data, are becoming common; structured search over XML data will soon follow. This is particularly true in the enterprise search domain, where engines attempt to integrate data from the Web and corporate knowledge portals with data residing in proprietary databases. In this paper we extend previous schemes by which an inverted index based search engine can efficiently support queries that contain numeric restrictions in addition to standard, free-text portions. Furthermore, we analyze both the known schemes and our extensions in terms of index-build time, index space and query processing time. We show how to maximize query processing performance while respecting limits on index size and build time, or conversely, how to minimize index space and build time while maintaining guarantees on runtime performance. Thus, we concisely analyze the trade-off between index size and build time, and runtime performance. Finally, we present experimental results that demonstrate significant performance benefits attained by our method, as compared to alternative approaches. 1

The interoperability of information systems has been pursued for a long time and is even more demanded in the Internet era. This paper reviews the literature in this area, from the database perspective. It covers work on interconnection of databases, classification of data integration problems, major standards and architectures, and the most recent developments in the fields of semantic Web, Web services and scientific workflows.