11931665
Clustering for Approximate Similarity Search in High-Dimensional Spaces
We present a clustering and indexing paradigm (called Clindex) for high-dimensional search spaces. The scheme is designed for approximate similarity searches, where one would like to find many of the data points near a target point, but where one can tolerate missing a few near points. For such searches, our scheme can find near points with high recall in very few IOs and perform significantly better than other approaches. Our scheme is based on finding clusters and, then, building a simple but efficient index for them. We analyze the trade-offs involved in clustering and building such an index structure, and present extensive experimental results.
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.
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.
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.
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.
3731147
A Multi-tiered Model for Performance Analysis of Storage Area Network
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.
402079
Learning What to Talk about in Descriptive Games
Text generation requires a planning module to select an object of discourse and its properties. This is specially hard in descriptive games, where a computer agent tries to describe some aspects of a game world. We propose to formalize this problem as a Markov Decision Process, in which an optimal message policy can be defined and learned through simulation. Furthermore, we propose back-off policies as a novel and effective technique to fight state dimensionality explosion in this framework.
2028079
Strong uniqueness of the restricted Chebyshev center with respect to an RS-set in a Banach space
Let G be a strict RS-set (resp. an RS-set) in X and let F be a bounded (resp. totally bounded) subset of X satisfying rG (F) < rx (F), where rG (F) is the restricted Chebyshev radius of F with respect to G. It is shown that the restricted Chebyshev center of F with respect to G is strongly unique in the case when X is a real Banach space, and that, under some additional convexity assumptions, the restricted Chebyshev center of F with respect to G is strongly unique of order α ≥ 2 in the case when X is a complex Banach space.
139092767
An Improved Prefix Labeling Scheme: A Binary String Approach for Dynamic Ordered XML
A number of labeling schemes have been designed to facilitate the query of XML, based on which the ancestor-descendant relationship between any two nodes can be determined quickly. Another important feature of XML is that the elements in XML are intrinsically ordered. However the label update cost is high based on the present labeling schemes. They have to re-label the existing nodes or re-calculate some values when inserting an order-sensitive element. Thus it is important to design a scheme that supports order-sensitive queries, yet it has low label update cost. In this paper, we design a binary string prefix scheme which supports order-sensitive update without any re-labeling or re-calculation. Theoretical analysis and experimental results also show that this scheme is compact compared to the existing dynamic labeling schemes, and it provides efficient support to both ordered and un-ordered queries.