For complex data types such as multimedia, traditional data management methods are not suitable. Instead of attribute matching approaches, access methods based on object similarity are becoming popular. Recently, this resulted in an intensive research of indexing and searching methods for the similarity-based retrieval. Nowadays, many efficient methods are already available, but using them to build an actual search system still requires specialists that tune the methods and build the system manually. Several attempts have already been made to provide a more convenient high-level interface in a form of query languages for such systems, but these are limited to support only basic similarity queries. In this paper, we propose a new language that allows to formulate content-based queries in a flexible way, taking into account the functionality offered by a particular search engine in use. To ensure this, the language is based on a general data model with an abstract set of operations. Consequently, the language supports various advanced query operations such as similarity joins, reverse nearest neighbor queries, or distinct kNN queries, as well as multi-object and multi-modal queries. The language is primarily designed to be used with the MESSIF framework for content-based searching but can be employed by other retrieval systems as well.
Last of all, let us mention several efforts to create easy-to-use query tools that are not based on either XML or SQL. The authors of @cite_21 propose to issue queries via filling table skeletons and issuing weights for individual clauses, with the complex queries being realized by specifying a (visual) condition tree. @cite_15 , a simple language based on Lucene query syntax is proposed. Finally, @cite_10 describes a rich ontological query language that works with structured English sentences but requires advanced image segmentation and domain knowledge.
@cite_15 @cite_21 @cite_10
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Abstract Due to the popularity of the XML data format, several query languages for XML have been proposed, specially devised to handle data of which the structure is unknown, loose, or absent. While these languages are rich enough to allow for querying the content and structure of an XML document, a varying or unknown structure can make formulating queries a very difficult task. We propose an extension to XML query languages that enables keyword search at the granularity of XML elements, that helps novice users formulate queries, and also yields new optimization opportunities for the query processor. We present an implementation of this extension on top of a commercial RDBMS; we then discuss implementation choices and performance results. The paper discusses the design and implementation of the oquel query language for content based image retrieval. The retrieval process takes place entirely within the ontological domain defined by the syntax and semantics of the user query. Since the system does not rely on the pre-annotation of images with sentences in the language, the format of text queries is highly flexible. The language is also extensible to allow for the definition of higher level terms such as "cars", "people", "buildings", etc. on the basis of existing language constructs. Images are retrieved by deriving an abstract syntax tree form of a textual user query and probabilistically evaluating it by analysing the composition and perceptual properties of salient image regions in light of the query. The matching process utilises automatically extracted image segmentation and classification information and can incorporate any other feature extraction mechanisms or contextual knowledge available at processing time. We describe the construction of a generic natural language query interface to an XML database. Our interface can accept an arbitrary English sentence as a query, which can be quite complex and include aggregation, nesting, and value joins, among other things. This query is translated, potentially after reformulation, into an XQuery expression. The translation is based on mapping grammatical proximity of natural language parsed tokens in the parse tree of the query sentence to proximity of corresponding elements in the XML data to be retrieved. Our experimental assessment, through a user study, demonstrates that this type of natural language interface is good enough to be usable now, with no restrictions on the application domain. When users issue a query to a database, they have expectations about the results. If what they search for is unavailable in the database, the system will return an empty result or, worse, erroneous mismatch results. We call this problem the MisMatch problem. In this paper, we solve the MisMatch problem in the context of XML keyword search. Our solution is based on two novel concepts that we introduce: target node type and Distinguishability. Target Node Type represents the type of node a query result intends to match, and Distinguishability is used to measure the importance of the query keywords. Using these concepts, we develop a low-cost post-processing algorithm on the results of query evaluation to detect the MisMatch problem and generate helpful suggestions to users. Our approach has three noteworthy features: (1) for queries with the MisMatch problem, it generates the explanation, suggested queries and their sample results as the output to users, helping users judge whether the MisMatch problem is solved without reading all query results; (2) it is portable as it can work with any lowest common ancestor-based matching semantics (for XML data without ID references) or minimal Steiner tree-based matching semantics (for XML data with ID references) which return tree structures as results. It is orthogonal to the choice of result retrieval method adopted; (3) it is lightweight in the way that it occupies a very small proportion of the whole query evaluation time. Extensive experiments on three real datasets verify the effectiveness, efficiency and scalability of our approach. A search engine called XClear has been built and is available at http: xclear.comp.nus.edu.sg.