11420663
Discovering and ranking web services with BASIL: a personalized approach with biased focus
In this paper we present a personalized web service discovery and ranking technique for discovering and ranking relevant data-intensive web services. Our first prototype -- called BASIL -- supports a <i>personalized</i> view of data-intensive web services through source-biased focus. BASIL provides service discovery and ranking through source-biased probing and source-biased relevance metrics. Concretely, the BASIL approach has three unique features: (1) It is able to determine in very few interactions whether a target service is relevant to the given source service by probing the target with very precise probes; (2) It can evaluate and rank the relevant services discovered based on a set of source-biased relevance metrics; and (3) It can identify interesting types of relationships for each source service with respect to other discovered services, which can be used as value-added metadata for each service. We also introduce a performance optimization technique called source-biased probing with focal terms to further improve the effectiveness of the basic source-biased service discovery algorithm. The paper concludes with a set of initial experiments showing the effectiveness of the BASIL system.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
18506816
Manifold Parameterization
Manifold parameterization considers the problem of parameterizing a given triangular mesh onto another mesh surface, which could be particularly plane or sphere surfaces. In this paper we propose a unified framework for manifold parameterization between arbitrary meshes with identical genus. Our approach does this task by directly mapping the connectivity of the source mesh onto the target mesh surface without any intermediate domain and partition of the meshes. The connectivity graph of source mesh is used to approximate the geometry of target mesh using least squares meshes. A subset of user specified vertices are constrained to have the geometry information of the target mesh. The geometry of the mesh vertices is reconstructed while approximating the known geometry of the subset by positioning each vertex approximately at the center of its immediate neighbors. This leads to a sparse linear system which can be effectively solved. Our approach is simple and fast with less user interactions. Many experimental results and applications are presented to show the applicability and flexibility of the approach.
32876579
Medical image segmentation and retrieval via deformable models
A new method based on deformable shape models for medical image segmentation is described. Experiments for blood cell micrographs have been conducted to verify the accuracy of the shape model-based segmentation and object shape description method. The cell segmentation method does not require user input for initialization. Coherence information between cells is utilized via a globally consistent cost function. The proposed segmentation method can be used in automated analysis for images of stained blood smear and segmentation of other medical structures. A method for shape population-based retrieval is also described. Results of population-based image queries for a database of blood cell micrographs are shown.
2470562
Stretch-based tetrahedral mesh manipulation
We present a novel least scaling distortion metric to measure the deformation distortion for tetrahedral meshes. The stretch-like metric is a combination of Jacobian matrix norm and tetrahedron volume and has the properties of good shape preservation and rotation invariance. Based on our metric, we propose a uniform non-linear optimization solution to a variety of tetrahedral mesh manipulation applications including shape deformation, interpolation, deformation transfer, and deformation learning. Our approach can produce volume preserving and flip free tetrahedral mesh results, which performs much better than the previous tetrahedral manipulation approaches. We also demonstrate an efficient and practical application using free-form deformation technique. The object is embedded in a rough control tetrahedral mesh and deformed by editing the tetrahedral mesh with various constraints. Each vertex of the object can be obtained by its barycentric coordinates according to its embedding tetrahedron of the control tetrahedral mesh.
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.
5150850
Formalizing UML Models with Object-Z
The Unified Modeling Language (UML) has been developed as a standard language for object-oriented designs. Through its graphical and intuitive diagrams, software analysis and design process become easy. However, this graphical notation lacks precisely defined semantics. It is difficult to determine whether the design is consistent, unambiguous and complete. This paper provides a method of formalizing UML models. It gives the transforming rules from UML models to Object-Z constructs. With this method, the semantics of UML models are directly expressed in formal language Object-Z. The UML class, sequence and statechart diagrams are formalized using this method. A tool OZRose is developed to automate the transforming process.