More data is available today than ever before, and this availability has enabled groundbreaking new applications and societal advances. However, today's computing technology that stores, organizes, and searches data is struggling to keep up to the demands imposed by the data's growth and by the requirements of new applications. Data management systems need to adapt to support the evolving information needs of modern applications. This project will extend data management technology to support constrained search for collections of data items that satisfy complex requirements. The need for this functionality arises in many domains: Online marketplaces group products into meaningful collections based on customer preferences, travel agents organize vacation packages that coordinate travel and hotel reservations, and dietitians design meal plans that satisfy complex nutritional needs. Currently, such applications have to resort to ad hoc solutions that lead to suboptimal results and poor performance.
This project will establish the theoretical foundations and will address practical aspects of providing support for packages. A package is a group of data items that collectively satisfy a set of constraints. This project will extend data management technology to provide full-fledged support for packages, and will make contributions on three fronts: (1) a declarative language to support querying for packages, (2) evaluation strategies to efficiently compute answers to package queries, and (3) interaction techniques for package specification. The broader impact of this work will be the advancement of data management technology to handle emerging application needs, which in turn will increase the positive impact that data and computing systems have on society.
For further information see the project web site at:Â http://packagebuilder.cs.umass.edu
