Deborah L. McGuinness and Paulo Pinheiro da Silva
Registry-Based Support for Information Integration
To appear in Proceedings of IJCAI-2003's Workshop on Information
Integration on the Web, Acapulco, Mexico. August, 2003.
Abstract
In order for agents and humans to leverage the growing wealth of
heterogeneous information and services on the web, increasingly, they
need to understand the information that is delivered to them. In the
simplest case, an agent or human is retrieving "look-up" information
and would benefit from having access to provenance information
concerning recency, source authoritativeness, etc. In more
complicated situations where information is manipulated before it is
returned as an answer, agents and humans would benefit from
understanding the derivations and assumptions used. When services are
involved, users and agents also would benefit from understanding what
actions could be or were executed on the user's behalf. In this
paper, we introduce a strategy for registering information sources and
question answering systems providing support for implementing
distributed and cooperative web services. In this paper, we describe
the inference web infrastructure that supports explanations in
distributed environments such as the web and describe the elements of
its registry.
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