Infomaster is an information integration system that provides integrated access to multiple distributed heterogeneous information sources on the Internet, thus giving the illusion of a centralized, homogeneous information system. We say that Infomaster creates a virtual data warehouse. The core of Infomaster is a facilitator that dynamically determines an efficient way to answer the user's query using as few sources as necessary and harmonizes the heterogeneities among these sources. Infomaster handles both structural and content translation to resolve differences between multiple data sources and the multiple applications for the collected data. Infomaster connects to a variety of databases using wrappers, such as for any SQL databases through ODBC, and some World Wide Web (WWW) sources. There are several WWW user interfaces to Infomaster, including forms based and textual. Infomaster also includes a programmatic interface and it can download results in structured form onto a client computer. Infomaster has been in production use on the Stanford campus since 1995.
Michael R. Genesereth, Arthur M. Keller, and Oliver Duschka, "Infomaster: An Information Integration System," in proceedings of 1997 ACM SIGMOD Conference, May 1997. Also a Postscript version.
Oliver M. Duschka and Michael R. Genesereth, "Infomaster - An Information Integration Tool," in proceedings of the International Workshop "Intelligent Information Integration" during the 21st German Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence, KI-97. Freiburg, Germany, September 1997. Also a Postscript version.
Arthur M. Keller, "Smart Catalogs and Virtual Catalogs," in Readings in Electronic Commerce, Ravi Kalakota and Andrew Whinston, eds., Addison-Wesley, 1997. Also a Postscript version
Arthur M. Keller and Michael R. Genesereth, "Using Infomaster to Create a Housewares Virtual Catalog," in Int. Journal of Electronic Markets, Institute for Media and Communication Management, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, Vol. 7, No. 4, 1997, pp. 41-45. Also a Postscript version.
Arthur M. Keller and Michael R. Genesereth, "Multivendor Catalogs: Smart Catalogs and Virtual Catalogs," in EDI Forum, The Journal of Electronic Commerce, Vol. 9, No. 3, September 1996. Also a Postscript version.
Oliver M. Duschka and Michael R. Genesereth, "Query Planning in Infomaster," in proceedings of the Twelfth Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, SAC '97, San Jose, February 1997. Also a Postscript version.
Oliver M. Duschka and Michael R. Genesereth, "Answering Recursive Queries Using Views," in proceedings of the Sixteenth ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems, PODS-97, Tucson, May 1997. Best Newcomer Paper Award. Also a Postscript version.
Oliver M. Duschka, "Query Optimization Using Local Completeness," in proceedings of the Fourteenth AAAI National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI-97, Providence, Rhode Island, July 1997. Also a Postscript version.