234966
Prototyping Digital Libraries Handling Heterogeneous Data Sources - The ETANA-DL Case Study
Information systems used in archaeology have several needs: interoperability among heterogeneous systems, making information available without significant delay, long-term preservation of data, and providing a suite of services to users. In this paper, we show how digital library techniques can be employed to provide solutions to three of these problems. We show this by describing a prototype for an archaeological Digital Library (ETANA-DL). First, ETANA-DL applies and extends the metadata harvesting approach to address some of the needs interoperability, rapid access to data, and data preservation. Second, we show that availability of a pool of components that implement common DL services has helped in rapidly creating the prototype, which was subsequently used for requirements elicitation. However, understanding complex archaeological information systems is a difficult task. Third, therefore, we describe our efforts to model these systems using the 5S framework, and show how the partially developed model has been used to implement complex services helping users carry out key tasks with the integrated data.
14252554
Discovering and Reconciling Semantic Conflicts: A Data Mining Perspective
Current approaches to semantic interoperability require human intervention in detecting potential conflicts and in defining how those conflicts may be resolved. This is a major impedance to achieving “logical connectivity”, especially when the dumber of disparate sources is large. In this paper, we demonstrate that the detection and reconciliation of semantic conflicts can be automated using tools and techniques developed by the data mining community. We describe a process for discovering such rules that represent the relationships among semanticaly related attributes and illustrate the effectiveness of our approach with examples.
15496678
Discovery of context-specific ranking functions for effective information retrieval using genetic programming
The Internet and corporate intranets have brought a lot of information. People usually resort to search engines to find required information. However, these systems tend to use only one fixed ranking strategy regardless of the contexts. This poses serious performance problems when characteristics of different users, queries, and text collections are taken into account. We argue that the ranking strategy should be context specific and we propose a , new systematic method that can automatically generate ranking strategies for different contexts based on genetic programming (GP). The new method was tested on TREC data and the results are very promising.
16272457
SimFusion: measuring similarity using unified relationship matrix
In this paper we use a Unified Relationship Matrix (URM) to represent a set of heterogeneous data objects (e.g., web pages, queries) and their interrelationships (e.g., hyperlinks, user click-through sequences). We claim that iterative computations over the URM can help overcome the data sparseness problem and detect latent relationships among heterogeneous data objects, thus, can improve the quality of information applications that require com- bination of information from heterogeneous sources. To support our claim, we present a unified similarity-calculating algorithm, SimFusion. By iteratively computing over the URM, SimFusion can effectively integrate relationships from heterogeneous sources when measuring the similarity of two data objects. Experiments based on a web search engine query log and a web page collection demonstrate that SimFusion can improve similarity measurement of web objects over both traditional content based algorithms and the cutting edge SimRank algorithm.
15362027
ETANA-DL: managing complex information applications - an archaeology digital library
Summary form only given. Archaeological research results in the generation of large quantities of heterogeneous information managed by different projects using custom information systems. We demonstrate a prototype digital library (DL) for integrating and managing archaeological data and providing services useful to various user communities. ETANA-DL is a model-based, componentized, extensible, archaeological DL that manages complex information sources using the client-server paradigm of the open archives initiative protocol for metadata harvesting (OAI-PMH). We present a prototype of ETANA-DL that builds on the 5S meta-model for developing for archaeological systems. We demonstrate our approach, used to integrate and handle highly heterogeneous data and the various services that ETANA-DL currently supports - searching, browsing, personal collections, workflows, discussions, annotations, etc. We are working on the structural aspects of the meta-model, and have used the results to develop advanced cross-collection searching and browsing services.
4216648
Optimizing web search using web click-through data
The performance of web search engines may often deteriorate due to the diversity and noisy information contained within web pages. User click-through data can be used to introduce more accurate description (metadata) for web pages, and to improve the search performance. However, noise and incompleteness, sparseness, and the volatility of web pages and queries are three major challenges for research work on user click-through log mining. In this paper, we propose a novel iterative reinforced algorithm to utilize the user click-through data to improve search performance. The algorithm fully explores the interrelations between queries and web pages, and effectively finds "virtual queries" for web pages and overcomes the challenges discussed above. Experiment results on a large set of MSN click-through log data show a significant improvement on search performance over the naive query log mining algorithm as well as the baseline search engine.
18510844
Structural Properties of XPath Fragments
We study structural properties of each of the main sublanguages of XPath [8] commonly used in practice. First, we characterize the expressive power of these language fragments in terms of both logics and tree patterns. Second, we investigate closure properties, focusing on the ability to perform basic Boolean operations while remaining within the fragment. We give a complete picture of the closure properties of these fragments, treating XPath expressions both as functions of arbitrary nodes in a document tree, and as functions that are applied only at the root of the tree. Finally, we provide sound and complete axiom systems and normal forms for several of these fragments. These results are useful for simplification of XPath expressions and optimization of XML queries.
5459818
Putting context into schema matching
Attribute-level schema matching has proven to be an important first step in developing mappings for data exchange, integration, restructuring and schema evolution. In this paper we investigate contextual schema matching, in which selection conditions are associated with matches by the schema matching process in order to improve overall match quality. We define a general space of matching techniques, and within this framework we identify a variety of novel, concrete algorithms for contextual schema matching. Furthermore, we show how common schema mapping techniques can be generalized to take more effective advantage of contextual matches, enabling automatic construction of mappings across certain forms of schema heterogeneity. An experimental study examines a wide variety of quality and performance issues. In addition, it demonstrates that contextual schema matching is an effective and practical technique to further automate the definition of complex data transformations.
12168122
Structural properties of XPath fragments
We study structural properties of each of the main sublanguages of navigational XPath (W3c Recommendation) commonly used in practice. First, we characterize the expressive power of these language fragments in terms of both logics and tree patterns. Second, we investigate closure properties, focusing on the ability to perform basic Boolean operations while remaining within the fragment. We give a complete picture of the closure properties of these fragments, treating XPath expressions both as functions of arbitrary nodes in a document tree, and as functions that are applied only at the root of the tree. Finally, we provide sound and complete axiom systems and normal forms for several of these fragments. These results are useful for simplification of XPath expressions and optimization of XML queries.
40017587
Keys for XML
Abstract We discuss the definition of keys for XML documents, paying particular attention to the concept of a relative key , which is commonly used in hierarchically structured documents and scientific databases.
123606281
Combining null space-based Gabor features for face recognition
We propose a face recognition strategy combining various discriminating Gabor features in multi-scales and multi-orientations. A bank of well-chosen Gabor filters is applied on the image to construct a group of feature vectors, and then the Null Space-based LDA (NLDA) is performed simultaneously on each orientation channel and the original image to give 5 component classifier outputs, which are then combined to increase the final recognition rate. Experimental results on the FERET database demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of our proposed method.