Omnibase: Uniform Access to Heterogeneous Data for Question Answering

Boris Katz, Sue Felshin, Deniz Yuret, Ali Ibrahim, Jimmy J. Lin, Gregory Marton, Alton Jerome McFarland, Baris Temelkuran. In Birger Andersson, Maria Bergholtz, Paul Johannesson (Eds.): Natural Language Processing and Information Systems, 6th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, NLDB 2002, Stockholm, Sweden, June 27-28, 2002, Revised Papers. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2553 Springer 2002, ISBN 3-540-00307-X.

Abstract: Although the World Wide Web contains a tremendous amount of information, the lack of uniform structure makes finding the right knowledge difficult. A solution is to turn the Web into a virtual database and to access it through natural language. We built Omnibase, a system that integrates heterogeneous data sources using an object-property-value model. With the help of Omnibase, our Start natural language system can now access numerous heterogeneous data sources on the Web in a uniform manner, and answers millions of user questions with high precision.

Download PDF.

Related link