The Snoopy Concept: Fighting heterogeneity in semistructured and collaborative information systems by using recommendations

The collaborative creation and manipulation of semistructured data imposes the major problem of structure heterogeneity. The more users enter information, the more heterogeneous the structure of information becomes. This proliferation of the schema has a significantly negative impact on the performance of querying facilities as structured, unified access of data is no longer possible. In this paper we present the Snoopy Concept, a novel approach for collaborative, semistructured information systems within an online environment. It deals with structure heterogeneity by incorporating the user in the alignment process of data already during the insertion. This is accomplished by providing the users with useful recommendations how to structure information. Furthermore, the system encourages users to enter more information as it points users to missing bits of information.