MobiFace: A Mobile Application for Faceted Search over Hidden Web Databases

A large number of web databases are hidden behind form-based interfaces (consisting of interface components such as textboxes, drop-down boxes, etc) for users to enter their desired values in a search query. Form-based interfaces are not always easy to use and error-prone on mobile devices, mainly because of limitations such as smaller screen, trickier text input, etc. We build MobiFace which is a faceted search system over a hidden database for mobile users. The goal of our system is to help a user to find her tuple of interest with as fewer questions as possible. MobiFace dynamically suggests facets for drilling down into the hidden web database such that the navigation cost is minimized. We run the experiment over real IMDB dataset on a mobile device.