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School of Communication and Information Professor Paul Kantor and two other Rutgers faculty members have received $1.6 million from Telcordia Technologies to improve information finding across the vast number of data sources that exist around the world.
Kantor, a professor in the Department of Library and Information Science, will lead the project, which is based at the interdisciplinary Center for Discrete Mathematics and Computational Science (DIMACS).
Professors Tina Eliassi-Rad and Alexander Borgida of Rutgers’ Department of Computer Science will work with Kantor. The trio will study ontologies, or formal representations of data source content, and how people are linked to each other within and across data sources.
“This project will solve the problems posed by the explosion in the number of data sources that exist around the world,” said Kantor, who is also an associate graduate faculty member in the computer science department. “There are millions of collections of data, including all the databases maintained by governments and businesses. Much of it is not accessible over the World Wide Web.”
As a result, Kantor said, individuals who want to analyze a problem are prevented from doing so because the process of translation from one database to another is very labor intensive.
And considering 1 million data sources – a fraction of those that exist – would require some 500 billion specific translations. The Telcordia-funded project will seek to automate that process.
The Telcordia effort is directed by Dr. John Wullert and Dr. Munir Cochinwalla. The telecommunications company’s work on the project is sponsored by the Air Force Research Laboratory.
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