Interactively building agents for consumer-side data mining

Integrating and mining data from different web sources can make end-users well-informed when they make decisions. One of many limitations that bars end-users from taking advantages of such process is the complexity in each of the steps required to gather, integrate, monitor, and mine data from different websites. We present the idea of combining the data integration, monitoring, and mining as one single process in the form of an intelligent assistant that guides end-users to specify their mining tasks by just answering questions. This easy-to-use approach, which trades off complexity in terms of available operations with the ease of use, has the ability to provide interesting insight into the data that would requires days of human effort to gather, combine, and mine manually from the web.