Information Integration for e-Commerce:
Approaches and Research Issues

Vishal Sikka,
Bodha.com

Abstract

1. The overall state of III applications in e-commerce (e.g., comparison shopping, personal data retrieval, etc.).
2. Two approaches to comparison shopping, TSIMMIS based, and Infomaster based, and some technical overview of each of these two; as well, some (very brief) tradeoffs and comparisons.
3. Research issues, e.g., scaling to millions of stores, query planning and optimization, caching, change detection.
4. Other applications, e.g., news gathering, personal portals, classifieds.

Biography

Dr. Vishal Sikka is the founder of Bodha.com, a startup company developing innovative e-commerce technologies using knowledge-based information integration. Prior to founding bodha.com, Vishal was a founder and CTO at IBrain Software, Inc. (acquired by PatternRx, Inc. -- a company developing information integration applications for healthcare and bioinformatics, and chronic disease based web communities). Vishal has worked with Xerox (Fuji) Palo Alto Labs, CommerceNet, and Stanford University. His prior technical experiences include research on Intelligent Integration of Information, Logic, Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Agents, Description-based Attachments and the Internet, including commerce and services. Vishal has organized technical conferences and seminars and participated in ANSI/ISO committees as part of delegations representing USA in the areas of information integration, software interoperation, agents based communication and other related areas.
Vishal holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Stanford University.