4779943
SERFing the Web: web site management made easy
In the era of electronic publishing, there is a need for a comprehensive Web Site Management System (WSMS) that provides an end-to-end solution ranging from integration of web sites to re-structuring and maintenance of new customized web views. Today, while many research efforts focus on generating diversified web sites, our Re-Web system [CRCK98] is the first to look at easing this process for end-users by providing libraries of pre-defined generic t ransformations for web re-structuring and visual tools for the generation and browsing of such transformations. Re-Web translates web information to an OO schema and data, re-structures and integrates information at the OODB level (SERF [CR99]) and finally generates web pages from the information in the database. The Re-Web system uses JDK1.2, Java Swing, and PSE Pro6.0 as its persistent storage. We use LotusXSL and IBM's XML parser for the web generation module. Re-Web system (Figure 1) has been implemented and tested on WinNT and Solaxis. I t provides tools for generating, restructuring and maintaining web sites.
4781375
SERFing the web: The Re-Web approach for web re-structuring
In our emerging digital paper-less society, massive amount of information is being maintained in on-line repositories and diverse web site representations of this information must be served over the Internet to different user groups. E-commerce and digital libraries are two representative sample applications with such needs. In this paper we present a database-centric approach called Re-Web that addresses this need for flexible web site generation, re-structuring, and maintenance. Re-Web is based on two key ideas. First, we exploit the web site structure by associating web semantics (XML equivalents) with the modeling constructs of the ODMG object model to aid the web site generation process. By capturing the logical structure of web views within the OODB system, we can efficiently maintain the web views using standard database techniques. Secondly, to ease the process of specification and construction of multiple customized web view sites, we also propose the notion of generic web view transformations that are encapsulated into re-usable templates. Thus desired new web view sites can be generated simply by applying the corresponding transformations on the underlying database to produce web view classes and then by applying the web semantics on the newly built view classes. The Re-Web system has been implemented using PSE by Object Design Inc. as object repository, ODMG as object model, OQL as transformation language, SERF as OODB evolution facility and IBM XML parser and LotusXSL processor to aid the web site generation. A case study using Re-Web is also presented to illustrate the working of the system. To the best of our knowledge, Re-Web is the first web site management system focusing on the issue of re-usable view generation templates at the content and not at the presentation style level of abstraction.
4792658
Active Page Generation via Customizing XML for Data Beans in E-Commerce Applications
In this paper, we analyze enabling technologies for typical e-business applications in terms of their multi-tier system architecture and their Model-Control-View (MCV) programming model. Based on observed limitations of the JSP (Java Server Page) technique commonly adopted for dynamic page generation (the view logic), we instead propose an alternative solution approach, namely, a generic schema mapping strategy to generate XML documents and DTDs from enterprise data beans. First, we describe in detail the XML generation process for the content composition logic. We also outline the XSL processing for the transformation logic. The separation of these two logics results in a generic solution to the bean viewing problem. In particular, it improves the bean reusability via its XML representative compared to the rigid strategy of hard-coding logics into JSP. Our proposed XML mapping solution represents a potentially valuable addition to future versions of the enterprise data beans specification. The trade-off between performance and flexibility of these alternative solutions is discussed. Lastly, we survey the state-of-art research results and emerging stardards related to this XML model mapping approach.
4775385
A fine-grained replacement strategy for XML query cache
Caching popular queries and reusing results of previously computed queries is one important query optimization technique, especially in modern distributed environments such as the WWW. Based on the recent proliferation of XML data and the emergence of the XQuery language, we are thus developing a query- based caching system for XQuery queries, called ACE-XQ. ACE-XQ applies innovative query containment and rewriting strategies to answer incoming user queries based on the cached XQueries, whenever possible, instead of accessing remote XML data sources.To manage the space of the cache, a straightforward application of traditional replacement strategies would correspond to removing a complete cached query and its derived XML document as a whole when space needs to be freed. This coarse granularity however does not match well with the typical access pattern of web searches where new queries often partially overlap with cached queries.In this paper, we propose a novel replacement strategy appropriate for such query-based XML caching systems. In particular, we collect user access statistics at the granularity of the XML path structure instead of the complete XML query regions. We then apply a more fine-grained replacement strategy that purges XML fragments off a cached region instead of the whole XML document and accordingly adjusts the query descriptor. This may better capture the user access patterns since more frequently used XML document fragments are likely to remain in the cache while other less beneficial parts are purged. This approach has been implemented in our ACE-XQ System. Preliminary experiment results illustrate the performance improvement achievable by our fine-grained replacement strategy over the one which replaces a whole XML view at a time when the cache size is relatively large.
4773437
XCache: a semantic caching system for XML queries
A wide range of Web applications retrieve desired information from remote XML data sources across the Internet, which is usually costly due to transmission delays for large volumes of data. Therefore we propose to apply the ideas of semantic caching to XML query processing systems [2], in particular the XQuery engine. Semantic caching [3] implies view-based query answering and cache management. While it is well studied in the traditional database context, query containment for XQuery is left unexplored due to its complexity coming with the powerful expressiveness of hierarchy, recursion and result construction. We hence have developed the first solution for XQuery processing using cached views.We exploit the connections between XML and tree automata, and use subtype relations between two regular expression types to tackle the XQuery containment mapping problem. Inspired by XDuce [1], which explores the use of tree-automata-based regular expression types for XML processing, we have designed a containment mapping process to incorporate type inference and subtyping mechanisms provided by XDuce to establish containment mappings between regular-expression-type-based pattern variables of two queries. We have implemented a semantic caching system called XCache (see Figure 1), to realize the proposed containment and rewriting techniques for XQuery.The main modules of XCache include: (1) Query Decomposer. An input query is is decomposed into source-specific subqueries explicitly represented by matching patterns and return structures. (2) Query Pattern Register. By registering a few queries into semantic regions, we warm up XCache at its initialization phase. (3) Query Containment Mapper. The XDuce subtyper is incorporated into the containment mapper for establishing query containment mappings between variables of a new query and each cached query. (4) Query Rewriter. We implement the classical bucket algorithm and further apply heuristics to decide on an "optimal" rewriting plan if several valid ones exist. (5) Replacement Manager. We free space for new regions by both complete and partial replacement. (6) Region Coalescer. We apply a coalescing strategy to control the region granularity over time.
4784687
SERF: ODMG-based generic re-structuring facility
The age of information management and with it the advent of increasingly sophisticated technologies have kindled a need in the database community and others to re-structure existing systems and move forward to make use of these new technologies. Legacy application systems are being transformed to newer state-of-the-art systems, information sources are being mapped from one data model to another, a diversity of data sources are being transformed to load, cleanse and consolidate data into modern data-warehouses [CR99].
Re-structuring is thus a critical task for a variety of applications. For this reason, most object-oriented database systems (OODB) today support some form of re-structuring support [Tec94, Obj93, BKKK87]. This existing support of current OODBs [BKKK87, Tec94, Obj93] is limited to a pre-defined taxonomy of simple fixed-semantic schema evolution operations. However, such simple changes, typically to individual types only, are not sufficient for many advanced applications [Bré96]. More radical changes, such as combining two types of redefining the relationship between two types, are either very difficult or even impossible to achieve with current commercial database technology [Tec94, Obj93]. In fact, most OODBs would typically require the user to write ad-hoc programs to accomplish such transformations. Research that has begun to look into the issue of complex changes [Bré96, Ler96] is still limited by providing a fixed set of some selected (even if now more complex) operations.
To address these limitations of the current restructuring technology, we have proposed the SERF framework which aims at providing a rich environment for doing complex user-defined transformations flexibly, easily and correctly [CJR98b]. The goal of our work is to increase the usability and utility of the SERF framework and its applicability to re-structuring problems beyond OODB evolution. Towards that end, we provide re-usable transformations via the notion of SERF Templates that can be packaged into libraries, thereby increasing the portability of these transformations. We also now have a first cut at providing an assurance of consistency for the users of this system, a semantic optimizer that provides some performance improvements via enhanced query optimization techniques with emphasis on the re-structuring primitives [CNR99]. In this demo we give an overview of the SERF framework, its current status and the enhancements that are planned for the future. We also present an example of the application of SERF to a domain other than schema evolution, i.e., the web restructuring.
9822806
Wavelet-based optical flow estimation
In this paper, a new algorithm for accurate optical flow estimation using discrete wavelet approximation is proposed. The proposed method takes advantages of the nature of wavelet theory, which can efficiently and accurately represent "things", to model optical flow vectors and image related functions. Each flow vector and image function are represented by linear combinations of wavelet basis functions. From such wavelet-based approximation, the leading coefficients of these basis functions carry the global information of the approximated "things". The proposed method can successfully convert the problem of minimizing a constraint function into that of solving a linear system of a quadratic and convex function of wavelet coefficients. Once all the corresponding coefficients are decided, the flow vectors can be determined accordingly. Experiments conducted on both synthetic and real image sequences show that our approach outperformed the existing methods in terms of accuracy.
13763556
A new scheme for an automatic generation of multi-variable fuzzy systems
Abstract We present a new novel method of automatically generating a multi-variable fuzzy inference system from the given sample sets. We first decompose the sample set, say Λ , into a cluster of sample sets associated with the given input variables, then compute the associated fuzzy rules and membership functions for each variable, independent of the other variables, by solving a single input multiple output fuzzy system extracted from the set cluster. The resulting decomposed fuzzy rules and membership functions for all the variables are integrated back into the fuzzy system appropriate for the original sample set Λ . Taking advantage of the independence of the input variables in computing the decomposed systems, we show that the computational complexity of the multi-variable system can in principle be reduced to that of a single variable if we can use a parallel processing multi-CPU system. We have verified our claim using an eight variable nonlinear function.
13928372
VRules: an effective association-based classifier for videos
Video classification is an important step towards multimedia understanding. Most state-of-the-art approaches which apply HMM to capture the temporal information of videos have the limitation by assuming that the current state of a video depends only on the immediate previous state. Nevertheless, this assumption may not hold for videos of various categories. In this paper, we present an effective video classifier which employs the association rule mining technique to discover the actual dependence relationship between video states. The discriminatory state transition patterns mined from different video categories are then used to perform classification. Besides capturing the association between states in the time space, we also capture the association between low-level features in spatial dimension to further distinguish the semantics of videos. Experimental results show that the performance of our association rule based classifier is quite promising.
411372
Stratification Approach to Modeling Video
The explosive growth of audiovisual information in the last few years has made the development of advanced video modeling and management tools an urgent task. In this research, we investigate the use of stratification approach to model the contextual information of video contents as multi-layered strata. By judiciously choosing the right level and types of strata, we are able to automate a major part of the strata extraction process. Using the strata as the basis, we have developed advanced functionalities to support the flexible retrieval and content-based browsing of video. A prototype has been developed to support the whole process of video management, from strata extraction, to indexing, retrieval and browsing. The prototype is tested in the domain of news video and the system has been found to be effective.
1426843
Priority based Overlay Multicast with Filtering Mechanism for Distributed Interactive Applications
The "priority-based directed minimum spanning tree" (PST) is designed for distributed interactive applications (DIAs) in which the data are delivered to the receiver node according to their priority; however PST cannot balance the bandwidth usage among the nodes and the system will be unstable when its scale increases. This paper proposes a novel overlay multicast protocol named priority based overlay multicast (POM), which uses the priority, delay and available bandwidth to construct the multicast tree, besides a filtering mechanism is proposed to rebuild the tree when the available bandwidth shortage appears. The effectiveness of our protocol is demonstrated in the simulation results, showing that POM uses the available bandwidth efficiently, besides it keeps the system stable when its scale increases