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.