TheaterLoc: A Case Study in Building An Information Integration System

While there has been much written about various information integration technologies, there has been little said regarding how to combine these technologies together to build an entire application. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of TheaterLoc, an information integration application that allows users to retrieve information about theaters and restaurants for cities in the Los Angeles area, including an interactive map depicting their relative locations and video trailers of the movies playing at the various area theaters. 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, wrappers for each of the web-based data sources, and a video server to stream the movie trailers. We focus in detail on the mediator technologies, such as data modeling, source axiom compilation, and query planning. We also describe how the wrappers present an interface for querying data on web sites, aiding in information retrieval used during data integration. Finally, we discuss some of the major integration problems we encountered, as well as our plans to deal with them.