The project focuses on several crucial requirements of upcoming information management systems: integrated access to heterogeneous sources, data warehousing, and multimedia data. It also integrates education and research. As part of the educational component of this project, UCSD's database curriculum is being reshaped to provide students with hands-on experience, basic principles, and exposure to research challenges in the above areas. The research enhances the state of the art in two areas: the integration of very large numbers of Internet sources and the extraction and querying of semantic information from video data. In the area of data integration, query processing algorithms are developed and integrated into the TSIMMIS mediator system; they use knowledge of data replication to avoid retrieving redundant/replicated data and enhance the availability and efficiency of the system. A new cost-based optimizer is developed for high performance in browsing of partial results. The optimizer is provided with probabilistic information on source data overlap and develops plans for efficient delivery of partial answers. In the area of video data, the COMIX system is developed. COMIX is customized by users with SQL-like actions and queries that assist COMIX in extracting semantic information orders of magnitude faster than by a brute-force approach. COMIX introduces novel query processing optimizations which exploit the sequentiality, fuzziness and continuity of the video data. In the upcoming era where the Web and the digital TV signal will enter every living room, the proposed version of the TSIMMIS mediator system will allow the user to search the vast volumes of Web data in a manner that exploits redundancy and replication of Web data, rather than being impeded by it (as is currently the case.) Then the COMIX system will be a step towards "smart VCRs", which will be screening the digital TV signal and extracting information of interest to the user. http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/~yannis
