Alon Halevy
Dataspaces: Co-existence with Heterogeneity
Dataspaces are loosely related collections of heterogeneous information. Examples of dataspaces include the enterprise, the desktop, digital libraries, government agencies, and the smart home. The goal of Dataspace Support Systems (DSSPs) is to provide several services over such collections, including querying and browsing, discovery of content and relationships between disparate items, and robust and efficient access to the information. The key aspect that distinguishes DSSPs from Information Integration systems is that they do not require reconciling semantic heterogeneity before any of these services can be provided. The goal is to offer some services immediately, and invest the effort required for semantic integration only where necessary.
I will describe the dataspaces and their associated support systems, and discuss some recent work that gets us closer to realizing such systems. I will also describe where techniques from Knowledge Representation and Reasoning will be critical for the success of such systems.
Biography
Alon Halevy is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington in Seattle, and currently on leave at Google. His research interests are in data integration, semantic heterogeneity, personal information management, XML, peer-data management systems, database theory, knowledge representation, and more generally, the intersection between Database and AI technologies. His research developed several systems, such as the Information Manifold data integration system, machine learning based schema matching, and the Tukwila XML data integration system. In 1999, Dr. Halevy co-founded Nimble Technology, one of the first companies in the Enterprise Information Integration space. In 2004, Dr. Halevy founded Transformic Inc., a company for that created search engines for the deep web, content residing in databases behind web forms. 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, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, and on the Advisory Committee of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. Prior to joining the University of Washington in 1998, Dr. Halevy was a principal member of technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, and then at AT&T Laboratories. He received his Ph.D in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1993.