Enabling Technologies for Harnessing Information Explosion

The amount of information accessible on the Internet and other repositories is increasing at an alarming rate. Presence and availability of information is quite different from being able to access the right information at the right time. Easy and flexible access to such large repositories of data also poses its own set of problems. Some of the problems faces today are: the ability to access relevant data without information overload, monitor only needed data and receive it in a timely manner, ability to filter data to reduce the amount of information to be analyzed manually, and the ability to classify data into groups that are beneficial.

The focus of this presentation will be on how information explosion, although beneficial in a larger context, baffles the user in terms of the time, energy, and resources spent in searching, browsing, retrieving, monitoring, filtering, and classifying them. We discuss the problem, issues, and various technologies that are needed for harnessing information in a way that provides relevant and useful information in a timely manner (just-in-time) and reduce user involvement as much as possible. One such technology is the “push” technology in contrast to the “pull” technology. WebVigiL is a project at UTA/IT Lab that has explored Internet change monitoring for the above purpose.

In addition to the applicability of the push technology and its uses, we will discuss several other technologies that allow us to harness appropriate information from potentially large repositories that are continuously changing/evolving. Some of the technologies that will be discussed in this talk are: mining, filtering, classification, and monitoring.

In this talk, I will relate the results of some of the projects that are underway at the Information Technology Laboratory at UTA to address the above problem.