Meaningful Labeling of Integrated Query Interfaces

The contents of Web databases are accessed through queries formulated on complex user interfaces. In many domains of interest (e.g. Auto) users are interested in obtaining information from alternative sources. Thus, they have to access many individual Web databases via query interfaces. We aim to construct automatically a well-designed query interface that integrates a set of interfaces in the same domain. This will permit users to access information uniformly from multiple sources. Earlier research in this area includes matching attributes across multiple query interfaces in the same domain and grouping related attributes. In this paper, we investigate the naming of the attributes in the integrated query interface. We provide a set of properties which are required in order to have consistent labels for the attributes within an integrated interface so that users have no difficulty in understanding it. Based on these properties, we design algorithms to systematically label the attributes. Experimental results on seven domains validate our theoretical study. In the process of naming attributes, a set of logical inference rules among the textual labels is discovered. These inferences are also likely to be applicable to other integration problems sensitive to naming: e.g., HTML forms, HTML tables or concept hierarchies in the semantic Web.