TheaterLoc: using information integration technology to rapidly build virtual applications

Although much has been written about various information integration technologies, little has been said regarding how to combine these technologies together to build an entire application. We demonstrate TheaterLoc, an information integration application that allows users to retrieve information about theatres and restaurants for various U.S. cities, including an interactive map depicting their relative locations. The data retrieved by TheaterLoc comes from five distinct heterogeneous and distributed sources. The enabling technology used to achieve the integration includes: the Ariadne information mediator, a Web site wrapper learning tool, the Theseus execution system, and a mechanism for distributed spatial query planning. Our system is novel because it demonstrates how "virtual applications" can be rapidly built from a set of integration tools and existing online data sources.