WHIRL swMATH ID: 2620 Software Authors: Cohen, W.W. Description: The integration of distributed, heterogeneous databases, such as those available on the World Wide Web, poses many problems. Here we consider the problem of integrating data from sources that lack common object identifiers. A solution to this problem is proposed for databases that contain informal, natural-language “names” for objects; most Web-based databases satisfy this requirement, since they usually present their information to the end-user through a veneer of text. We describe WHIRL, a “soft” database management system which supports “similarity joins,” based on certain robust, general-purpose similarity metrics for text. This enables fragments of text (e.g., informal names of objects) to be used as keys. WHIRL includes textual objects as a built-in type, similarity reasoning as a built-in predicate, and answers every query with a list of answer substitutions that are ranked according to an overall score. Experiments show that WHIRL is much faster than naive inference methods, even for short queries, and efficient on typical queries to real-world databases with tens of thousands of tuples. Inferences made by WHIRL are also surprisingly accurate, equaling the accuracy of hand-coded normalization routines on one benchmark problem, and outperforming exact matching with a plausible global domain on a second. Homepage: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wcohen/whirl/ Keywords: knowledge representation; information retrieval; textual similarity; heterogeneous databases; information integration; text categorization; information extraction Related Software: C4.5; XPath; SSE; Dyna; Figaro; PRISM; MCINTYRE; BLOG; Church; IBAL; PITA; CP-logic; ProbLog; XIRQL; See5; XQuery; WordNet; Python; ADMIT; Odyssee Cited in: 11 Publications Standard Articles 1 Publication describing the Software, including 1 Publication in zbMATH Year WHIRL: A word-based information representation language. Zbl 0938.68841Cohen, W. W. 2000 all top 5 Cited by 24 Authors 2 Cohen, William W. 2 De Raedt, Luc 2 Koubarakis, Manolis 2 Koutris, T. 2 Raftopoulou, P. 2 Tryfonopoulos, C. 1 Bischof, Christian H. 1 Blockeel, Hendrik 1 Bruynooghe, Maurice 1 Chbeir, Richard 1 Hirsh, Haym 1 Hovland, Paul D. 1 Kimmig, Angelika 1 Knoblock, Craig A. 1 Kosala, Raymond 1 Maurer, Hermann A. 1 Mehmood, Rizwan 1 Minton, Steven 1 Nevill-Manning, C. G. 1 Norris, Boyana 1 Tejada, Sheila 1 Tekli, Joe 1 Van den Bussche, Jan 1 Yetongnon, Kokou all top 5 Cited in 7 Serials 1 Artificial Intelligence 1 Machine Learning 1 Information Systems 1 The Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) 1 Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation 1 CEJOR. Central European Journal of Operations Research 1 Computer Science Review Cited in 3 Fields 11 Computer science (68-XX) 1 Numerical analysis (65-XX) 1 Operations research, mathematical programming (90-XX) Citations by Year