3582970
Building a Semantic Web System for Scientific Applications: An Engineering Approach
This paper presents an engineering experience for building a Semantic Web compliant system for a scientific application – agricultural zoning. First, we define the concept of ontological cover and a set of relationships between such covers. These definitions, based on domain ontologies, can be used, for example, to support the discovery of services on the Web. Second, we propose a semantic acyclic restriction on ontologies which enables the efficient comparison of ontological covers. Third, we present different engineering solutions to build ontology views satisfying the acyclic restriction in a prototype. Our experimental results unveil some limitations of the current Semantic Web technology to handle large data volumes, and show that the combination of such technology with traditional data management techniques is an effective way to achieve highly functional and scalable solutions.
9143242
Update Monitoring: The CQ Project
In rapidly growing open environments such as the Internet, users experience information starvation in the midst of data overload, due to difficulties similar to finding the needle in a haystack. Update monitoring is a promising area of research where we bring the right information to the user at the right time, instead of forcing the user through manual browsing or repeated submission of queries. As an example of update monitoring research, we outline our work in the Continual Queries (CQ) project, including its basic concepts, software architecture, and current implementation status.
33902172
An Object-Centered Approach for Manipulating Hierarchically Complex Objects
We present an object-centered approach for manipulating hierarchically complex objects, which covers an extended object model and an object-centered query algebra. Extensions of the object model are mainly based on a separation of structural and semantic elements in modeling complex objects, including a general distinction between aggregation reference and association reference, an introduction of type inheritance into aggregation hierarchies and a support for combination of aggregation inheritance with subtype inheritance. Based on the extensions, we develop a query algebra as an integral part of the model. Unlike most of existing algebra-based query languages, our object algebra takes complex object collectively as a unit of high level queries and allows complex objects to be accessed at all levels of aggregation hierarchies without having resort to any kind of path expressions. Features of aggregation hierarchies, such as acyclicity and aggregation inheritance, have played important roles in such a development. We have also formally described the output type of each operator in order for dynamic classification of query results in the IsA type/class lattice. Although the design is based on the chosen object-oriented model, other object-oriented databases are possible. We feel that the proposal largely covers the query requirements for complex objects, and meanwhile provides users with an opportunity to remain within the framework of the model of complex objects while querying database. As a consequence, the flexibility and adaptability of the object-oriented model against schema changes are increased.
12589406
VISTA: Validating and Refining Clusters Via Visualization
Clustering is an important technique for understanding of large multidimensional datasets. Most of clustering research to date has been focused on developing automatic clustering algorithms and cluster validation methods. The automatic algorithms are known to work well in dealing with clusters of regular shapes, for example, compact spherical shapes, but may incur higher error rates when dealing with arbitrarily shaped clusters. Although some efforts have been devoted to addressing the problem of skewed datasets, the problem of handling clusters with irregular shapes is still in its infancy, especially in terms of dimensionality of the datasets and the precision of the clustering results considered. Not surprisingly, the statistical indices works ineffective in validating clusters of irregular shapes, too. In this paper, we address the problem of clustering and validating arbitrarily shaped clusters with a visual framework (VISTA). The main idea of the VISTA approach is to capitalize on the power of visualization and interactive feedbacks to encourage domain experts to participate in the clustering revision and clustering validation process. The VISTA system has two unique features. First, it implements a linear and reliable visualization model to interactively visualize multi-dimensional datasets in a 2D star-coordinate space. Second, it provides a rich set of user-friendly interactive rendering operations, allowing users to validate and refine the cluster structure based on their visual experience as well as their domain knowledge.
13182282
InfoFilter: Supporting quality of service for fresh information delivery
With the explosive growth of the Internet and World Wide Web comes a dramatic increase in the number of users that compete for the shared resources of distributed system environments. Most implementations of application servers and distributed search software do not distinguish among requests to different web pages. This has the implication that the behavior of application servers is quite unpredictable. Applications that require timely delivery of fresh information consequently suffer the most in such competitive environments. This paper presents a model of quality of service (QoS) and the design of a QoS-enabled information delivery system that implements such a QoS model. The goal of this development is two-fold. On one hand, we want to enable users or applications to specify the desired quality of service requirements for their requests so that application-aware QoS adaptation is supported throughout the Web query and search processing. On the other hand, we want to enable an application server to customize how it should respond to external requests by setting priorities among query requests and allocating server resources using adaptive QoS control mechanisms. We introduce the Infopipe approach as the systems support architecture and underlying technology for building a QoS-enabled distributed system for fresh information delivery.
599285
Differential evaluation of continual queries
We define continual queries as a useful tool for monitoring of updated information. Continual queries are standing queries that monitor the source data and notify the users whenever new data matches the query. In addition to periodic refresh, continual queries include Epsilon Transaction concepts to allow users to specify query refresh based on the magnitude of updates. To support efficient processing of continual queries, we propose a differential re-evaluation algorithm (DRA), which exploits the structure and information contained in both the query expressions and the database update operations. The DRA design can be seen as a synthesis of previous research on differential files, incremental view maintenance, and active databases.
14344981
Mutation operators for Object-Z specification
As a powerful means of measuring a test set, mutation testing has been applied to program-based testing for a long time. However, with the development of formal specification technique, the formal specifications also play an important role in software testing. For measuring the quality of the specification-based test cases, researchers provide some mutation operators for the logic predicates. With the emergence of the object-oriented formal specifications, these mutation operators cannot completely model the faults arise in an object-oriented specification and from the misunderstanding of the specification. This paper investigates the faults that may occur in the object-oriented specifications, and gives a set of mutation operators for the Object-Z specifications to model these faults. These mutation operators provide an approach to measuring specification-based test cases and validating the Object-Z specifications.
10661094
Designing information systems in social context: a goal and scenario modelling approach
In order to design a better information system, a designer would like to have notations to visualize how design experts' know-how can be applied according to one's specific social and technology situation. We propose the combined use of a goal-oriented requirements language (GRL) and a scenario-oriented notation Use Case Maps (UCM) for representing design knowledge of information systems. Goal-oriented modelling is used throughout the requirements and design process. In GRL, goals are used to depict business objectives and system requirements, both functional and non-functional. Tasks are used to represent different ways for achieving goals. Means-ends reasoning is used to explore alternative solutions and their operationalizations into implementable system constructs. Social context is modelled in terms of dependency relationships among agents and roles. Scenarios expressed in UCM are used to describe elaborated business processes or workflow. The complementary use of goal-oriented modelling with GRL and scenario modelling with UCM is illustrated with an example of designing a web-based training system.
7311513
Polygonal Shape Blending with Topological Evolutions
This paper presents a new general approach to blend 2D shapes with different topologies. All possible topological evolutions are classified into three types by attaching three different topological cells. This formalism is resulted from Morse theory on the behavior of the 3D surface around a non-degenerate critical point. Also we incorporate degenerate topological evolutions into our framework which produce more attractive morphing effects. The user controls the morph by specifying the types of topological evolutions as well as the feature correspondences between the source and target shapes. Some techniques are also provided to control the vertex path during the morphing process. The amount of user input required to produce a morph is directly proportional to the amount of control the user wishes to impose on the process. The user may allow the system to automatically generate the morph as well. Our approaches are totally geometric based and are easy and fast enough in fully interactive time. Many experimental results show the applicability and flexibility of our approaches.
16978288
Interactive modeling of tree bark
There exist many computer graphics techniques which could achieve high quality tree generation. However, only few works focus on realistic modeling of tree bark. Difficulties lie in the complex appearance of the bark surfaces from a single image. We address three main issues here: feature specification; height field assignment; and texture correction. For feature specification, we use texton channel analysis to specify a variant of common bark features, inluding ironbark, vertical and horizontal fractures, tessellation, furrowed cork, and lenticels. For height field assignment, we develop an intuitive and easy-to-use user interface (UI). Here similarity-based texture editing is used for assigning height fields within a texton channel mask. For texture correction, we use the modeled height fields to eliminate the underlying lighting effects in a captured texture. Our modeling system is image-based: it takes as input a bark image and produces as output a textured height field representing a bark sample. We demonstrate that out method is an effective and easy-to-use technique to interactively model a variety of photo realistic bark surfaces.
45704904
Automatic Deformable Shape Segmentation for Image Database Search Applications
A method for shape based image database indexing is described. Deformable shape templates are used to group color image regions into globally consistent configurations. A statistical shape model is used to enforce the prior probabilities on global, parametric deformations for each object class. The segmentation is determined in part by the minimum description length (MDL) principle. Once trained, the system autonomously segments deformed shapes from the background, while not merging them with adjacent objects or shadows. The formulation can be used to group image regions based on any image homogeneity predicate; e.g., texture, color, or motion. Preliminary experiments in color segmentation and shape-based retrieval are reported.