About the Project
The vision of pay-as-you-go data integration has been articulated as providing various of the benefits of classical data integration, but with reduced up-front costs, combined with opportunities for incremental refinement, enabling a "pay as you go" approach. In a typical pay-as-you-go proposal, there is an initial automatic integration phase that produces rather poor quality results, and the integration is revised in the light of feedback from end-users, database experts, or from crowd sourcing.
Classically, data integration involves tasks such as identifying sources to integrate, finding matches between these sources, developing executable mappings between sources, and identifying duplicates among instances. In principle, all of these steps can benefit from a pay-as-you-go approach. Furthermore, pay-as-you-go techniques can be applied in different settings, from personal information management to web scale data access, and we have recently been working on linked open data.Research opportunities are available on a range of topics relating to pay-as-you-go data integration, including crowd sourcing for data integration, cost-effective feedback collection, and integrating data instances. PhD projects in this area at Manchester could involve Norman Paton, Alvaro Fernandes and Suzanne Embury, who work on different challenges and techniques.
For initial enquiries, please approach Norman Paton ([Email Address Removed]).
Funding Notes
Candidates who have been offered a place for PhD study in the School of Computer Science may be considered for funding by the School. Further details on School funding can be found at: http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/study/postgraduate-research/programmes/phd/funding/school-studentships/.
In addition, exceptional students may be considered for the President's Doctoral Scholar Award and the Dean's Award. Further details on these opportunities can be found at: http://www.eps.manchester.ac.uk/our-research/funding/.
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