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.
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.
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.
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.
33456865
Enterprise Information Integration - A Semantic Approach
Nowadays, we witness the advent of a new era in information technology as an enabler for an often proclaimed “knowledged society”. Many academicians – computer scientists, computational linguists and others – but also researchers in corporate settings investigate the use of “knowledge” as a means for intelligent information access in enterprises. Ontologies are commonly considered a formal means for modelling and instantiating conceptual structures upon which implicit knowledge can be inferred. In an industrial context, however, domain-specific conceptual information is only one corporate information resource. Relevant business information comprises facts on goods, projects, experts, customers, competitors and many other information bits as they are stored in enterprise information systems. A great wish of many executives is, however, to gain an integrated view on these assets and their relationships, thus deriving new insights relevant for their business. To achieve this goal, ontologies can help with respect to semantic data integration. A problem is, however, that the construction and maintenance of ontologies is expensive. Another problem is that the business data are usually stored redundantly in different heterogeneous data repositories and the connectivity – a prerequisite for intelligence – is not explicit. The approach discussed in the remainder will show how a mix of information extraction and classification methods can be used to automatically set-up and update a network of business objects serving as a corporate memory index. The latter represents a rich semantic access structure for filtering and individualizing the retrieval of relevant business information.
60542101
A novel ant clustering algorithm based on cellular automata
Based on the principle of cellular automata in artificial life, an artificial ant sleeping model (ASM) and an ant algorithm for cluster analysis (A4C) are presented. Inspired by the behaviors of gregarious ant colonies, we use the ant agent to represent a data object. In ASM, each ant has two states: a sleeping state and an active state. The ant's state is controlled by a function of the ant's fitness to the environment it locates and a probability for the ants becoming active. The state of an ant is determined only by its local information. By moving dynamically, the ants form different subgroups adaptively, and hence the data objects they represent are clustered. Experimental results show that the A4C algorithm on ASM is significantly better than other clustering methods in terms of both speed and quality. It is adaptive, robust and efficient, achieving high autonomy, simplicity and efficiency.
267445
Biological Nomenclatures: A Source of Lexical Knowledge and Ambiguity
There has been increased work in developing automated systems that involve natural language processing (NLP) to recognize and extract genomic information from the literature. Recognition and identification of biological entities is a critical step in this process. NLP systems generally rely on nomenclatures and ontological specifications as resources for determining the names of the entities, assigning semantic categories that are consistent with the corresponding ontology, and assignment of identifiers that map to well-defined entities within a particular nomenclature. Although nomenclatures and ontologies are valuable for text processing systems, they were developed to aid researchers and are heterogeneous in structure and semantics. A uniform resource that is automatically generated from diverse resources, and that is designed for NLP purposes would be a useful tool for the field, and would further database interoperability. This paper presents work towards this goal. We have automatically created lexical resources from four model organism nomenclature systems (mouse, fly, worm, and yeast), and have studied performance of the resources within an existing NLP system, GENIES. Using nomenclatures is not straightforward because issues concerning ambiguity, synonymy, and name variations are quite challenging. In this paper we focus mainly on ambiguity. We determined that the number of ambiguous gene names within the individual nomenclatures, across the four nomenclatures, and with general English ranged from 0%-10.18%, 1.187%-20.30%, and 0%-2.49% respectively. When actually processing text, we found the rate of ambiguous occurrences (not counting ambiguities stemming from English words) to range from 2.4%-32.9% depending on the organisms considered.
2568892
Traffic Adaptive MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Network
In this paper, we propose TA-MAC, a traffic load adaptive Medium Access Control protocol for wireless sensor network. TA-MAC modified the contention window mechanism of S-MAC. It adjusts the initial contention window according to the current traffic load to reduce the collision probability and employs a fast backoff scheme to reduce the time for idle listening during backoff procedure, which both reduce the energy consumption. Simulation results show that TA-MAC outperforms S-MAC.
30915392
An HCI method to improve the human performance reduced by local-lag mechanism
Local-lag mechanism can maintain consistency for replicated continuous applications, but with a tradeoff of adding delay to local operations. To relieve the negative effects of the delay, this paper proposes an HCI method named echo. With the help of the echo method users can immediately perceive the results of their operations and how large the lag is. In order to evaluate the proposed method, a desktop collaborative virtual environment (CVE) system and a virtual object control task were employed to study the effects of the echo method on human performance (including task completion time, error count, and interaction quality). Experimental results indicate that when the lag exceeds 100ms the echo method can improve human performance with the effects becoming more evident when a larger lag is used.