Welcome to the home page of the Miner/Event project!
Miner/Event was developed by Mark Meiss and Heather Roinestad in the spring of 2004 for a graduate-level course in data mining on the Web. It is a basic question-answering application that attempts to decide what year in history is most closely associated with a past event expressed in the form of a search query. Our primary motivation in developing this system has been to explore the challenges involved with building interactive question-answering applications that use the Web as a semi-structured, high-latency database.
Miner/Event is written entirely in Java and makes use of the Tidy HTML parser and the Google API. To run the Miner/Event code, you'll need to have at least version 1.4 of the Java runtime environment. All platforms that support the full Java API should work fine; we've had success with both Windows XP and Linux.
You can get a hold of the system from the links below. You'll need to download the library package and then either the binary package (if you just want to run the system) or the source package (if you want to modify the code and then rebuild).
Library package (727 KB) Binary package (52 KB) Source package (14 KB)
To run the application, you'll need to have the library and application jarfiles in your current class path and then invoke the "Driver" class. Here's a sample command line for Windows:
java -cp "lib\Tidy.jar;lib\googleapi.jar;live\year.jar" Driver
Invoking the driver with no command-line options as above will cause the application to print out usage information.
Note that we haven't put the code under the GNU Public License. That's only because we'd like to add the provision that if you download and modify the code, we'd like to know about your project and have the chance to incorporate your improvements (with credit, of course). Just contact either Mark or Heather with a brief note about your intentions and we'll almost certainly give you a green light.