Welcome to COSC-6490-B, Issues in Information Integration, for winter term 2006.

Materials, instructions, and notices for the course will accumulate here over the semester.

There is no assigned textbook for the course. There will be assigned readings, chosen from journal and conference papers and book chapters on the topics.

Course notices will accumulate here over the term. Be certain to check here regularly.

Also, be certain to refresh this page via your browser when you visit to ensure that you are not looking at an old, cached copy. Otherwise, you can miss the latest message.

• Take-home final is up. Due Friday 21 April.

  Apologies not to have this posted earlier. Let me know in advance if the due-date is problematic for you. There is some flexibility. A deadline is just needed to finish things up.

• Many have asked for longer on the projects. Let's set the deadline for Friday 28 April. We cannot really go beyond that, as grades will need to be in.

  If you are done earlier and turn in your project earlier, great! I know some people were working to get done sooner and towards the Monday 17 April that I said in class. I will be judicious and take that into account, in case folks worry those who work longer would do better.

• Monday 3 April: Last class day! No readings for the day. Just discussion.

• As agreed, Assignment #3 is gone. Assignments #1 and #2 are now worth 15% each.

• Assignment #2 is up and running.
  Due Wednesday 5 April.

  If you want, you can install the Firefox extension XPath Checker that I used in class. You can do this for the Firefox web browser under your deparmental account with no problem; extensions install locally for the user, not globally for everyone. After adding XPath Checker to your firefox, the option "View XPath" appears in the menu that pops up when you click on a page with the right mouse button.

• Syllabus
• Lecture Notes & Materials
  
  1. Introduction
     1-per PS, 2-per PS, 1-per PDF, 2-per PDF
  2. Background
     1. datalog
        1-per PS, 4-per PS, 1-per PDF, 4-per PDF
     2. datalog & negation
        1-per PS, 4-per PS, 1-per PDF, 4-per PDF
  3. query containment
     1. conjunctive queries (CQ)¹
        1-per PS, 1-per PDF
     2. Saraiya's containment test¹
        1-per PS, 1-per PDF
     3. generalizations over CQ¹
        1-per PS, 1-per PDF
     4. contaiment tests and arithmetic¹
        1-per PS, 1-per PDF
  4. logical information integration
     • query folding²
       1-per PS, 2-per PS, 1-per PDF, 2-per PDF
  5. query caching
     • answering queries by semantic caches
       1-per PS, 4-per PS, 1-per PDF, 4-per PDF
  6. XML
     • The XML Revolution: Technologies for the future Web (Anders Møller and Michael Schwartzbach)
       Provides a nice, small overview of XML, XML Schema, and other XML related stuff.
  ¹Jeffrey D. Ullman's notes for Stanford's CS-345 (Fall 1996).
  ²Michael Kossoff's notes for Stanford's CS-246 (Spring 2003).
• Readings
  (Apologies, but these are only accessible from the cs.yorku.ca domain to honour copyright.)

• Assignments
  1. Assignment #1 (v2): PS, PDF
     (Version 1: PS, PDF)
     Due Wednesday 22 February.
     Due Friday 24 February.
  2. Assignment #2: PS, PDF
     bibliography.xml
     Due Monday 3 April.
     Due Wednesday 5 April.
• Discussion Schedule
• Projects
• Take-home Final: PS, PDF
  Due Friday 21 April.