Reducing End-User Burden in Everyday Data Organization

This book introduces various approaches to help reduce end-user burden in organizing their everyday data. To ease the birthing pain of creating new databases, the book proposes a system with direct manipulation interface and user-friendly operators for the end-user to easily design and evolve her data schema. To facilitate incorporation of external data sources, a sample-driven schema mapping approach is introduced so that the user can freely provide sample instances in her collection and the system will automatically deduce the desired schema mapping from the external data sources to her own repository. In a similar flavor, we propose an approach to facilitate the user in specifying selection conditions via example data points she wants to select. Finally, to help the user incorporate source data updates into her own collection, the book proposes a technique to automatically update the integrated data according to external source change, by conducting efficient incremental information integration.