Abstract

For any human activity there is a wealth of information available in the Internet and in corporate intranets. Unfortunately, such information is distributed among many sites, with different data formats, schemas, and semantics. Moreover, information access per se is of limited value. What is needed is a system that integrates and structures diverse information in support of the user tasks and goals. The system must focus on the relevant information, evaluate tradeoffs, and suggest courses of action to the user. In this demo, we we present Heracles, a constraint-based framework to easily develop such systems.
As an example consider travel planning. There are numerous sites with relevant travel information: flight schedules and fares (eg, www. orbitz. com), hotel locations and rates (eg, www. itn. com), car rental sites (eg, www. hertz. com), weather information (eg, weather. yahoo. com), maps and route planning (eg, www. mapquest. com), airport parking rates (eg, www. airwise. com), etc. This public information needs to be integrated with user preferences, such as preferred airlines or flying times (eg avoid red-eye flights), cost constraints, and company policies, such as allowable airlines, expenses caps, per-diem or mileage reimbursement rates. Although the user could visit these sites and take into accounts all the constraints and preferences, it is extremely tedious, error-prone, and time-consuming. A system that queries these the remote sites, access local information, and enforces the constraints and preferences is much more desirable.

Date

August 7, 2025

Authors

J Ambite, C Knoblock, Maria Muslea, Steven Minton

Journal

Access mode https://pdfs. semanticscholar. org/948a/5889a5a61ac0c768d367750a468243ff5da8. pdf