WISE-Integrator: An Automatic Integrator of Web Search Interfaces for E-Commerce

This chapter presents WISE-Integrator-a tool that performs automatic integration of web interfaces of search engines. WISE-Integrator employs sophisticated techniques to identify matching attributes from different search interfaces for integration. It also resolves domain differences of matching attributes. The experimental results based on 20 and 50 interfaces in two different domains indicate that WISE integrator can achieve high attribute matching accuracy and can produce high-quality integrated search interfaces without human interactions. The chapter provides a comprehensive solution to the problem of automatically integrating the interfaces of E-commerce search engines. The problem is significantly different from schema integration for traditional database applications. With appropriate interface representation of local interfaces, WISE-Integrator automatically integrates them into a global interface using only domain (application) independent knowledge. The two-step approach based on positive matches and predictive matches for merging attributes was shown to be very effective. The proposed approach can also be applied to other domains of E-commerce or ones beyond E-commerce such as digital library and some professional databases on the Internet.