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

More and more databases are becoming Web accessible through form-based search interfaces, and many of these sources are E-commerce sites. Providing a unified access to multiple E-commerce search engines selling similar products is of great importance in allowing users to search and compare products from multiple sites with ease. One key task for providing such a capability is to integrate the Web interfaces of these E-commerce search engines so that user queries can be submitted against the integrated interface. Currently, integrating such search interfaces is carried out either manually or semi-automatically, which is inefficient and difficult to maintain. In this paper, we present 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. Our 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.

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