81526
Capability based mediation in TSIMMIS
Conventional mediators focus their attention on the contents of the sources and their relationship to the integrated views provided to the users. They do not take into account the capabilities of sources to answer queries. This may lead them to generate plans involving source queries that cannot be answered by the sources. In the TSIMMIS system, we have developed a source capability sensitive plan generation module that constructs feasible plans for user queries in the presence of limited source capabilities
1386080
Using Constraints to Describe Source Contents in Data Integration Systems
In data integration systems, information sources often have constraints, such as "all houses stored at a source have a unique address." These constraints are useful in computing answers to queries and facilitating information exchange.
2113121
Computing capabilities of mediators
Existing data-integration systems based on the mediation architecture employ a variety of mechanisms to describe the query-processing capabilities of sources. However, these systems do not compute the capabilities of the mediators based on the capabilities of the sources they integrate. In this paper, we proposed a framework to capture a rich variety of query-processing capabilities of data sources and mediators. We present algorithms to compute the set of supported queries of a mediator, based on the capability limitations of its sources. Our algorithms take into consideration a variety of query-processing techniques employed by mediators to enhance the set of supported queries.
8510271
Supporting Efficient Record Linkage for Large Data Sets Using Mapping Techniques
This paper describes an efficient approach to record linkage. Given two lists of records, the record-linkage problem consists of determining all pairs that are similar to each other, where the overall similarity between two records is defined based on domain-specific similarities over individual attributes. The record-linkage problem arises naturally in the context of data cleansing that usually precedes data analysis and mining. Since the scalability issue of record linkage was addressed in [21], the repertoire of database techniques dealing with multidimensional data sets has significantly increased. Specifically, many effective and efficient approaches for distance-preserving transforms and similarity joins have been developed. Based on these advances, we explore a novel approach to record linkage. For each attribute of records, we first map values to a multidimensional Euclidean space that preserves domain-specific similarity. Many mapping algorithms can be applied, and we use the Fastmap approach [16] as an example. Given the merging rule that defines when two records are similar based on their attribute-level similarities, a set of attributes are chosen along which the merge will proceed. A multidimensional similarity join over the chosen attributes is used to find similar pairs of records. Our extensive experiments using real data sets show that our solution has very good efficiency and recall.
7967297
2D BubbleUp: Managing Parallel Disks for Media Servers
In this study we present a scheme called two-dimensional BubbleUp (2DB) for managing parallel disks in a multimedia server. Its goal is to reduce initial latency for interactive multimedia applications, while balancing disk loads to maintain high throughput. The 2DB scheme consists of a data placement and a request scheduling policy. The data placement policy replicates frequently accessed data and places them cyclically throughout the disks. The request scheduling policy attempts to maintain free ``service slots'''' in the immediate future. These slots can then be used to quickly service newly arrived requests. Through examples and simulation, we show that our scheme significantly reduces initial latency and maintains throughput comparable to that of the traditional schemes.
8850461
Schema-guided wrapper maintenance for web-data extraction
Extracting data from Web pages using wrappers is a fundamental problem arising in a large variety of applications of vast practical interests. There are two main issues relevant to Web-data extraction, namely wrapper generation and wrapper maintenance. In this paper, we propose a novel schema-guided approach to the problem of automatic wrapper maintenance. It is based on the observation that despite various page changes, many important features of the pages are preserved, such as syntactic patterns, annotations, and hyperlinks of the extracted data items. Our approach uses these preserved features to identify the locations of the desired values in the changed pages, and repair wrappers correspondingly by inducing semantic blocks from the HTML tree. Our intensive experiments on real Web sites show that the proposed approach can effectively maintain wrappers to extract desired data with high accuracies.
3458490
Supporting ranking and clustering as generalized order-by and group-by
The Boolean semantics of SQL queries cannot adequately capture the "fuzzy" preferences and "soft" criteria required in non-traditional data retrieval applications. One way to solve this problem is to add a flavor of "information retrieval" into database queries by allowing fuzzy query conditions and flexibly supporting grouping and ranking of the query results within the DBMS engine. While ranking is already supported by all major commercial DBMSs natively, support of flexibly grouping is still very limited (i.e., group-by).
 In this paper, we propose to generalize group-by to enable flexible grouping (clustering specifically) of the query results. Different from clustering in data mining applications, our focus is on supporting efficient clustering of Boolean results generated at query time. Moreover, we propose to integrate ranking and clustering with Boolean conditions, forming a new type of ClusterRank query to allow structured data retrieval. Such an integration is nontrivial in terms of both semantics and query processing. We investigate various semantics of this type of queries. To process such queries, a straightforward approach is to simply glue the techniques developed for ranking-only and clustering-only together. This approach is costly since both ranking and clustering are treated as blocking post-processing tasks upon Boolean query results by existing techniques. We propose a summary-based evaluation method that utilizes bitmap index to seamlessly integrate Boolean conditions, clustering, and ranking. Experimental study shows that our approach significantly outperforms the straightforward one and maintains high clustering quality.
5432512
RankSQL: query algebra and optimization for relational top-k queries
This paper introduces RankSQL, a system that provides a systematic and principled framework to support efficient evaluations of ranking (top-k) queries in relational database systems (RDBMS), by extending relational algebra and query optimization. Previously, top-k query processing is studied in the middleware scenario or in RDBMS in a "piecemeal" fashion, i.e., focusing on specific operator or sitting outside the core of query engines. In contrast, we aim to support ranking as a first-class database construct. As a key insight, the new ranking relationship can be viewed as another logical property of data, parallel to the "membership" property of relational data model. While membership is essentially supported in RDBMS, the same support for ranking is clearly lacking. We address the fundamental integration of ranking in RDBMS in a way similar to how membership, i.e., Boolean filtering, is supported. We extend relational algebra by proposing a rank-relational model to capture the ranking property, and introducing new and extended operators to support ranking as a first-class construct. Enabled by the extended algebra, we present a pipelined and incremental execution model of ranking query plans (that cannot be expressed traditionally) based on a fundamental ranking principle. To optimize top-k queries, we propose a dimensional enumeration algorithm to explore the extended plan space by enumerating plans along two dual dimensions: ranking and membership. We also propose a sampling-based method to estimate the cardinality of rank-aware operators, for costing plans. Our experiments show the validity of our framework and the accuracy of the proposed estimation model.
248537
New Invariant of DNA Sequences
For a DNA sequence with n bases, one can always associate it with an n x n nonnegative real symmetric matrix whose diagonal entries are zero. Once the matrix is given, its leading eigenvalue is usually calculated and used as an invariant to characterize the DNA sequence. Let M be such a matrix, and lambda1 its leading eigenvalue. Then (1/n)//M//m1 and sqrt [(n-1)/n]//M//F are the lower and upper bounds of lambda1, respectively. Since their arithmetic average is an approximate value of lambda1 and simpler for calculation, we can use it as an alternative invariant to characterize the DNA sequence. The utility of the new parameter is illustrated on the DNA sequences of five species: human, chimpanzee, mouse, rat, and gallus.
1209241
Spectral Energy Minimization for Semi-supervised Learning
Data mining problems often involve a large amount of unlabeled data and there is often very limited known information on the dataset. In such scenario, semi-supervised learning can often improve classification performance by utilizing unlabeled data for learning. In this paper, we proposed a novel approach to semi-supervised learning as as an optimization of both the classification energy and cluster compactness energy in the unlabeled dataset. The resulting integer programming problem is relaxed by a semi-definite relaxation where efficient solution can be obtained. Furthermore, the spectral graph methods provide improved energy minimization via the incorporation of additional criteria. Results on UCI datasets show promising results.
9373274
A heuristic for parallel machine scheduling with agreeable due dates to minimize the number of late jobs
Abstract Given a set of identical parallel machines and a set of jobs with different due dates and release times, we consider the problem of finding a schedule such that the number of late jobs is minimized, where the given due dates and release times are assumed to be agreeable. A heuristic algorithm is presented and a dynamic programming lower bounding procedure is developed. Computational experiments are performed to show the effectiveness of the heuristic.