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Dr. Chengkai Li has received a $10,000 Research Enhancement Program Grant

Sep. 01, 2008

University of Texas at Arlington Assistant Professor of Computer Science & Engineering Dr. Chengkai Li has received a $10,000 Research Enhancement Program grant to conduct research on problems associated with mashing up information on the Web.

The goal of this research is to build a system that automatically “mashes up” the Web to construct a database containing records and their relationships discovered from Web pages. The system would allow us to use the Web as the world’s largest database, thus bring the power of database queries to the Web and enable many expressive and powerful applications.

Today’s state-of-art technologies cannot meet the goals in this research, thus the project presents a significant research challenge. Dr. Li plans to develop techniques to automatically extract Web data and discover their relationships, and invent new ways of storing and indexing such information, which is very different from the precise and complete information found in conventional database systems. Dr. Li will also investigate the issues in providing querying and exploration facilities over such information.

By realizing the “mash-up” system and applications, this research has the potential to fundamentally change our ways of using the Web and substantially improve our ability of finding and exploring information. It can enormously benefit many application domains including E-commerce, government information systems, public health, travel planning services, and so on.