This book introduces various approaches to help reduce end-user burden
in organizing their everyday data. To ease the birthing pain of creating
new databases, the book proposes a system with direct manipulation
interface and user-friendly operators for the end-user to easily design
and evolve her data schema. To facilitate incorporation of external data
sources, a sample-driven schema mapping approach is introduced so that
the user can freely provide sample instances in her collection and the
system will automatically deduce the desired schema mapping from the
external data sources to her own repository. In a similar flavor, we
propose an approach to facilitate the user in specifying selection
conditions via example data points she wants to select. Finally, to help
the user incorporate source data updates into her own collection, the
book proposes a technique to automatically update the integrated data
according to external source change, by conducting efficient incremental
information integration.