Prof. Dr. Wolf-Thilo Balke

(TU Braunschweig)

"Intuitive Querying with Preferences: Exploiting Conceptual Knowledge"

Information gathering by accessing structured data in Web databases has changed our daily life. Typical examples like reading digital product review pages or using price comparison pages for the area of online shopping show that the available information can indeed be used effectively. Unfortunately, users face flood of information on the Web and are bound to experience problems when accessing heterogeneous sources in what is known as the Hidden Web. Thus, information gathering cannot always be performed efficiently. This is especially true for preference-based retrieval, where users only have a vague information need that should be satisfied. Many real world concepts are rather hard to describe: it is intuitively clear what a good solution to the need would be, but putting all important attributes and desired values into a specific database query is difficult. We will discuss how results from cognitive psychology can be applied to ease the load of querying databases and information systems.

Bio: Wolf-Tilo Balke currently is the chair of information systems at TU Braunschweig, Germany and a director of L3S Research Center of University of Hannover, Germany. Before that he was a research fellow at the University of California at Berkeley. His research is in the area of information systems and service provisioning, including preference-based retrieval algorithms and ontology-based discovery and selection of services. Wolf-Tilo Balke is the recipient of two Emmy-Noether-Grants of Excellence by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Scientific Award of the University Foundation Augsburg. He has received his B.A and MS degree in mathematics and a PhD in computer science from University of Augsburg, Germany.

Zeit:	Donnerstag, 11.02.2010, 17.15 Uhr
Ort:	Gebäude 48, Raum 680