The Cornell Web Lab Project

The purpose of the Cornell Web Lab Project (weblab.infosci.cornell.edu) is to provide researchers in various disciplines with tools to analyze the structure and content of the web as it existed at different points in time. In collaboration with the Internet Archive (www.archive.org), we have built a steadily growing archive containing billions of crawled web pages. Example analyses on this web archive include:

The Cornell Web Lab Project addresses a number of challenges. First, as the examples above illustrate, web data analysis is done by researchers from various disciplines. Therefore, one challenge it to develop interfaces for non-technical users. Moreover, most web analyses are actually not interested in web pages and hyperlinks, but relations between objects like user profiles or product descriptions. These substructures must first be extracted from the web pages. Of course, web data is often incomplete, inconsistent, outdated or otherwise incorrect. Users should be able to clean up the data before the analysis. Finally, the sheer size of the data calls for novel methods not only for data management, but also search, exploration and summarization.

We believe that difficult user tasks such as finding suitable subsets of pages for an analysis, extracting structured data sets and correcting errors can be much easier when tackled in a collaborative setting. As a first step, we have developed a prototype of a collaborative web data extraction tool that allows users to share their search results, structured data sets and even the extraction rules that they created. See the screencast of an early version of the prototype. Currently, we are investigating more advanced methos of user collaboration.

This is joint work with William Y. Arms, Mirek Riedwald, Biswanath Panda, Johannes Gehrke and Christoph Koch. Funded in part by National Science Foundation grants CNS-0403340, DUE-0127308, SES-0537606 and IIS-0634677.

XML Retrieval

XML is widely used not only for data exchange, but also for modeling and storing persistent semistructured data. An important class of XML applications deal with content embedded in a rich hierarchical or graph-shaped structure. Examples include scientific publications, digital encyclopedia, annotated web data, tagged linguistic corpora and taxonomies and gene expression data. Querying such data efficiently requires index structures that cover both the structure and the content. Moreover, while powerful query languages such as XQuery have found widespread adoption, non-technical users need more intuitive interfaces such as graphical exploration and search tools.

I worked on these problems during my graduate studies and Ph.D. at the Institute for Computer Science and the Center for Information and Language Processing (CIS), as a member of the CIS Research Group on Documents and Semistructured Data. The work includes the Content-Aware DataGuide index (CADG), the BIRD numbering scheme for XML trees and a cache system for XML queries and results. I have implemented these techniques in two prototypical XML retrieval systems that both make use of a relational backend for storing the XML data. While the first system processes queries in main-memory, the second one minimizes the expensive loading of intermediate query results by pushing the bulk of the query processing to the relational database, including access to the CADG structure and content index. This helped speed up the query processing by up to two orders of magnitude. The project also included work on ranking for vague content and structure queries in the context of the INEX XML retrieval initiative.

From September to November 2008, I took a leave of absence from Cornell University to work with FaST, A Microsoft® Subsidiary in Trondheim, Norway on fundamentals of XQuery support in their next-generation index engine.

This is joint work with Klaus Schulz, Holger Meuss and François Bry. Funded in part by the German National Science Foundation (DFG).