About BibFinder

BibFinder is a free cs bibliography meta-search engine developed by the Yochan Information Integration Group at Arizona State University. . It integrates CSB, DBLP, Network Bibliography, ACM Digital Library, ACM Guide, ScienceDirect, IEEE Xplore, CiteSeer, and Google Scholar. These sources are partially overlapping both in tuples and attributes. For example, some sources may have bibtex for a paper, some may have pdf file for the paper, some may have abstract. By combining them, we can present a unified and more complete view to the user. 

BibFinder is also a testbed we are developing for evaluating the techniques developed as part of the Havasu Project.  Since the response time and coverage of these sources vary widely, and the same paper's information may be stored partially and overlappingly over multiple sources, the testbed will provide an opportunity to exercise and evaluate all the Havasu techniques. In order to answer users query efficiently, we need to learn the coverage and overlap statistics (and of course response time statistics), and we also need to apply the multi-objective query optimization techniques to handle the coverage and response time tradeoffs to efficiently generate query plans. Since we are dealing with real web sources, monitoring the query plan execution becomes very important since these autonomous sources may be unavailable at any time for web site maintenance or other unexpected reasons. Havasu techniques are being applied to BibFinder to achieve the goal of generating first tuples fast, reducing the total response time of answering a user's query and generating more complete results which are delivered to the users in a streaming manner.

BibFinder introduces a two-phase query answering model. In the first phase, it tries to get and return only the basic information (title, authors and publish-date) of the references, that satisfy all conditions of a user query, as quickly as possible. In the second phase, for a user select reference, it tries to get the complete information (abstract, bibtex, full text, references ...) as quickly as possible. Note that in order to avoid copyright issues, we only give the URL links of the detailed information, and our users are actually requesting the detailed information from the original source sites themselves. So the authorization is not controlled by BibFinder but by the original source sites.

For detailed information about technical publications related to BibFinder, see here.

Last Modified: 12/12/2005 -0800