Heracles is an interactive data-driven constraint-based hierarchical planner. This project is named after the most famous Greco-Roman legendary hero, Heracles.
use search engines today to find information, but in many cases what people actually
want is an application that allows them to access a set of related sources, extract
the information they need, and integrate the data in ways that allows them to
solve their problems. The future of the Web involves going beyond traditional
information-retrieval-based search engines to much more advanced integration frameworks.
Heracles system is a framework for building information assistants, which support
the construction of domain-specific applications that extract and integrate data
to support a specific task. These are not search engines, but rather applications
that organize and integrate data to support a particular task.
Consider the problem of travel planning on the Web. There are a huge number of travel sites, each of which provides different types of information. You can go to one site and get hotel and flight information, another site to get the airports that are closest to your destination, a third site to get directions to your hotel, and yet a fourth site to find out the weather in the destination city. It is a tedious process to go to each of these sites, repeatedly entering the same information about dates, addresses, etc. Instead you would like the best of the Internet-related travel sources combined into a single integrated environment that can help you plan out a trip from beginning to end.
We have applied our general framework for creating information assistants to build an example travel assistant. The resulting system helps a user plan out a business trip from beginning to end. When you start the system, it first looks up the upcoming meetings in your calendar. After you have selected a meeting it extracts the dates for the meeting, looks up the location, checks the weather, and even makes a recommendation about whether you should fly, drive or take the train to the meeting.
application goes beyond what is provided in most travel web sites, by making recommendations
about whether you should park at the airport or drive and park your car and about
how you should get to your final destination from the airport. It helps select
a hotel based on your meeting location. And can even help you plan your trip to
help minimize the total cost or the total time you will be away from home. In
short, it provides all of the information that you need to plan a trip and links
this information together to provide a unified framework to quickly and efficiently
work out the details of a trip and make the appropriate reservations. Once the
trip has been booked the system even monitors your flights to notify you of any
schedule changes or last minute flight cancellations.
Alcmene is a mix-initiative system for building mixed-initiative system. This project is named after the mother of Heracles, Alcmene.
While Heracles was designed for implementing mixed-initiative, multi-source information assistant, each of these applications of Heracles required a significant effort to build and each successful application invariable generated requests for changes, additional sources, and new features. Ideally, we would like to allow users of the system to create, update, and improve their own mixed-initiative applications.
Built as one of the Heracles applications, Alcmene allows users to author new Heracles templates or to modify existing templates with no or minimum coding. Alcmene also provides the author with dynamic Heracles templates that update to offer choices and operations based on the current constraint structure.
In order to support authoring, we provide basic mechanisms for users to create variables and constraints. We also incorporate techniques in planning research to address the issues of how to identify the relevant sources, how to link the sources together, and how to relate the specific data instances from the various sources. More information about Alcmene can be found in the paper section.
Heracles was previously limited to run as an application which the user was required to download, install and configure . The user then wrote specialized templates that would process his query and produce the desired output. With Web Heracles, we have alleviated this limitation. Web Heracles has all the power of Heracles and more. Able to be run over any web server, Heracles has been transformed into a web application that connects to various web services and data sources to provide users with results to their queries in their own web browsers.
Finally, coupled with the above mentioned functionality (Alcmene) to graphically author user defined templates, Web Heracles provides the user the flexibility to design and create new Heracles templates and save their state. The user may decide to save his current work and return at a later time to finish his template. Web Heracles provides the user the ability to work from anywhere through a web browser, save his current work and return later on to either finish, update to use his newly created templates. With this ability, the user has access to his work from anywhere.
Similar to Heracles, Web Heracles also allows users to display and perform transformations on maps and satellite imagery. Web Heracles also provides the user with the functionality to pan, zoom and superimpose spatial imagery. It also possesses the ability to render vector data in a web browser from a variety of vector data formats including the Mapinfo and the ESRI Shapefile format.
For a demonstration of Web Heracles, refer to the WebMaps and the Geospatial Data Integration demos.