  In many scenarios, such as emergency response or ad hoc collaboration, it is
critical to reduce the overhead in integrating data. Ideally, one could perform
the entire process interactively under one unified interface: defining
extractors and wrappers for sources, creating a mediated schema, and adding
schema mappings ? while seeing how these impact the integrated view of the
data, and refining the design accordingly.
  We propose a novel smart copy and paste (SCP) model and architecture for
seamlessly combining the design-time and run-time aspects of data integration,
and we describe an initial prototype, the CopyCat system. In CopyCat, the user
does not need special tools for the different stages of integration: instead,
the system watches as the user copies data from applications (including the Web
browser) and pastes them into CopyCat?s spreadsheet-like workspace. CopyCat
generalizes these actions and presents proposed auto-completions, each with an
explanation in the form of provenance. The user provides feedback on these
suggestions ? through either direct interactions or further copy-and-paste
operations ? and the system learns from this feedback. This paper provides an
overview of our prototype system, and identifies key research challenges in
achieving SCP in its full generality.
