A Knowledge-based Web Information System for the Fusion of Distributed Classifiers

This chapter presents the design and development of WebDisC, a knowledge-based Web information system for the fusion of classifiers induced at geographically distributed databases. The main features of our system are: i) a declarative rule language for classifier selection that allows the combination of syntactically heterogeneous distributed classifiers, ii) a variety of standard methods for fusing the output of distributed classifiers, iii) a new approach for clustering classifiers in order to deal with the semantic heterogeneity of distributed classifiers, detect their interesting similarities and differences and enhance their fusion and iv) an architecture based on the Web services paradigm that utilizes the open and scalable standards of XML and SOAP.