Processing techniques for partial tree-pattern queries on XML data

In recent years, eXtensible Markup Language (XML) has become a de facto standard for exporting and exchanging data on the Web. XML structures data as trees. Querying capabilities are provided through patterns matched against the XML trees. Research on the processing of XML queries has focused mainly on tree-pattern queries. Tree-pattern queries are not appropriate for querying XML data sources whose structure is not fully known to the user, or for querying multiple data sources which structure information differently. Recently, a class of queries, called Partial Tree-Pattern Queries (PTPQs) was identified. A central feature of PTPQs is that the structure can be specified fully, partially, or not at all in a query. For this reason. PTPQs can be used for flexibly querying XML data sources. This thesis deals with processing techniques for PTPQs. In particular, it addresses the satisfiability, containment and minimization problems for PTPQs. In order to cope with structural expression derivation issues and to compare PTPQs, a set of inference rules is suggested and a canonical form for PTPQs that comprises all derived structural expressions is defined. This canonical form is used for determining necessary and sufficient conditions for PTPQ satisfiability. The containment problem is studied both in the absence and in the presence of structural summaries of data called dimension graphs. It is shown that this problem cannot be characterized by homomorphisms between PTPQs, even when PTPQs are put in canonical form. In both cases of the problem, necessary and sufficient conditions for PTPQ containment are provided in terms of homomorphisms between PTPQs and (a possibly exponential number of) tree-pattern queries. This result is used to identify a subclass of PTPQs that strictly contains tree-pattern queries for which the containment problem can be fully characterized through the existence of homomorphisms. To cope with the high complexity of PTPQ containment, heuristic approaches for this problem are designed that trade accuracy for speed. The heuristic approaches equivalently add structural expressions to PTPQs in order to increase the possibility for a homomorphism between two contained PTPQs to exist. An implementation and extensive experimental evaluation of these heuristics shows that they are useful in practice, and that they can be efficiently implemented in a query optimizer. The goal of PTPQ minimization is to produce an equivalent PTPQ which is syntactically smaller in size. This problem is studied in the absence of structural summaries. It is shown that PTPQs cannot be minimized by removing redundant parts as is the case with certain classes of tree-pattern queries. It is also shown that, in general, a PTPQ does not have a unique minimal equivalent PTPQ. Finally, sound, but not complete, heuristic approaches for PTPQ minimization are presented. These approaches gradually trade execution time for accuracy

Reasoning & Querying – State of the Art

Various query languages for Web and Semantic Web data, both for practical use and as an area of research in the scientific community, have emerged in recent years. At the same time, the broad adoption of the internet where keyword search is used in many applications, e.g. search engines, has familiarized casual users with using keyword queries to retrieve information on the internet. Unlike this easy-to-use querying, traditional query languages require knowledge of the language itself as well as of the data to be queried. Keyword-based query languages for XML and RDF bridge the gap between the two, aiming at enabling simple querying of semi-structured data, which is relevant e.g. in the context of the emerging Semantic Web. This article presents an overview of the field of keyword querying for XML and RDF

Materialized View Selection in XML Databases

Materialized views, a rdbms silver bullet, demonstrate its efficacy in many applications, especially as a data warehousing/decison support system tool. The pivot of playing materialized views efficiently is view selection. Though studied for over thirty years in rdbms, the selection is hard to make in the context of xml databases, where both the semi-structured data and the expressiveness of xml query languages add challenges to the view selection problem. We start our discussion on producing minimal xml views (in terms of size) as candidates for a given workload (a query set). To facilitate intuitionistic view selection, we present a view graph (called vcube) to structurally maintain all generated views. By basing our selection on vcube for materialization, we propose two view selection strategies, targeting at space-optimized and space-time tradeoff, respectively. We built our implementation on top of Berkeley DB XML, demonstrating that significant performance improvement could be obtained using our proposed approaches

Searchable Sky Coverage of Astronomical Observations: Footprints and Exposures

Sky coverage is one of the most important pieces of information about astronomical observations. We discuss possible representations, and present algorithms to create and manipulate shapes consisting of generalized spherical polygons with arbitrary complexity and size on the celestial sphere. This shape specification integrates well with our Hierarchical Triangular Mesh indexing toolbox, whose performance and capabilities are enhanced by the advanced features presented here. Our portable implementation of the relevant spherical geometry routines comes with wrapper functions for database queries, which are currently being used within several scientific catalog archives including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Galaxy Evolution Explorer and the Hubble Legacy Archive projects as well as the Footprint Service of the Virtual Observatory.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, submitted to PAS

Learning Twig and Path Queries

International audienceWe investigate the problem of learning XML queries, \emph{path} queries and \emph{twig} queries, from examples given by the user. A learning algorithm takes on the input a set of XML documents with nodes annotated by the user and returns a query that selects the nodes in a manner consistent with the annotation. We study two learning settings that differ with the types of annotations. In the first setting the user may only indicate \emph{required nodes} that the query must return. In the second, more general, setting, the user may also indicate \emph{forbidden nodes} that the query must not return. The query may or may not return any node with no annotation. We formalize what it means for a class of queries to be \emph{learnable}. One requirement is the existence of a learning algorithm that is \emph{sound} i.e., always returns a query consistent with the examples given by the user. Furthermore, the learning algorithm should be \emph{complete} i.e., able to produce every query with sufficiently rich examples. Other requirements involve tractability of the learning algorithm and its robustness to nonessential examples. We identify practical classes of Boolean and unary, path and twig queries that are learnable from positive examples. We also show that adding negative examples to the picture renders learning unfeasible

Semantics and result disambiguation for keyword search on tree data

Keyword search is a popular technique for searching tree-structured data (e.g., XML, JSON) on the web because it frees the user from learning a complex query language and the structure of the data sources. However, the convenience of keyword search comes with drawbacks. The imprecision of the keyword queries usually results in a very large number of results of which only very few are relevant to the query. Multiple previous approaches have tried to address this problem. Some of them exploit structural and semantic properties of the tree data in order to filter out irrelevant results while others use a scoring function to rank the candidate results. These are not easy tasks though and in both cases, relevant results might be missed and the users might spend a significant amount of time searching for their intended result in a plethora of candidates. Another drawback of keyword search on tree data, also due to the incapacity of keyword queries to precisely express the user intent, is that the query answer may contain different types of meaningful results even though the user is interested in only some of them. Both problems of keyword search on tree data are addressed in this dissertation. First, an original approach for answering keyword queries is proposed. This approach extracts structural patterns of the query matches and reasons with them in order to return meaningful results ranked with respect to their relevance to the query. The proposed semantics performs comparisons between patterns of results by using different types of ho-momorphisms between the patterns. These comparisons are used to organize the patterns into a graph of patterns which is leveraged to determine ranking and filtering semantics. The experimental results show that the approach produces query results of higher quality compared to the previous ones. To address the second problem, an original approach for clustering the keyword search results on tree data is introduced. The clustered output allows the user to focus on a subset of the results, and to save time and effort while looking for the relevant results. The approach performs clustering at different levels of granularity to group similar results together effectively. The similarity of the results and result clusters is decided using relations on structural patterns of the results defined based on homomor-phisms between path patterns. An originality of the clustering approach is that the clusters are ranked at different levels of granularity to quickly guide the user to the relevant result patterns. An efficient stack-based algorithm is presented for generating result patterns and constructing the clustering hierarchy. The extensive experimentation with multiple real datasets show that the algorithm is fast and scalable. It also shows that the clustering methodology allows the users to effectively retrieve their intended results, and outperforms a recent state-of-the-art clustering approach. In order to tackle the second problem from a different aspect, diversifying the results of keyword search is addressed. Diversification aims to provide the users with a ranked list of results which balances the relevance and redundancy of the results. Measures for quantifying the relevance and dissimilarity of result patterns are presented and a heuristic for generating a diverse set of results using these metrics is introduced

Graph pattern matching on social network analysis

Graph pattern matching is fundamental to social network analysis. Its effectiveness for identifying social communities and social positions, making recommendations and so on has been repeatedly demonstrated. However, the social network analysis raises new challenges to graph pattern matching. As real-life social graphs are typically large, it is often prohibitively expensive to conduct graph pattern matching over such large graphs, e.g., NP-complete for subgraph isomorphism, cubic time for bounded simulation, and quadratic time for simulation. These hinder the applicability of graph pattern matching on social network analysis. In response to these challenges, the thesis presents a series of effective techniques for querying large, dynamic, and distributively stored social networks. First of all, we propose a notion of query preserving graph compression, to compress large social graphs relative to a class Q of queries. We then develop both batch and incremental compression strategies for two commonly used pattern queries. Via both theoretical analysis and experimental studies, we show that (1) using compressed graphs Gr benefits graph pattern matching dramatically; and (2) the computation of Gr as well as its maintenance can be processed efficiently. Secondly, we investigate the distributed graph pattern matching problem, and explore parallel computation for graph pattern matching. We show that our techniques possess following performance guarantees: (1) each site is visited only once; (2) the total network traffic is independent of the size of G; and (3) the response time is decided by the size of largest fragment of G rather than the size of entire G. Furthermore, we show how these distributed algorithms can be implemented in the MapReduce framework. Thirdly, we study the problem of answering graph pattern matching using views since view based techniques have proven an effective technique for speeding up query evaluation. We propose a notion of pattern containment to characterise graph pattern matching using views, and introduce efficient algorithms to answer graph pattern matching using views. Moreover, we identify three problems related to graph pattern containment, and provide efficient algorithms for containment checking (approximation when the problem is intractable). Fourthly, we revise graph pattern matching by supporting a designated output node, which we treat as “query focus”. We then introduce algorithms for computing the top-k relevant matches w.r.t. the output node for both acyclic and cyclic pattern graphs, respectively, with early termination property. Furthermore, we investigate the diversified top-k matching problem, and develop an approximation algorithm with performance guarantee and a heuristic algorithm with early termination property. Finally, we introduce an expert search system, called ExpFinder, for large and dynamic social networks. ExpFinder identifies top-k experts in social networks by graph pattern matching, and copes with the sheer size of real-life social networks by integrating incremental graph pattern matching, query preserving compression and top-k matching computation. In particular, we also introduce bounded (resp. unbounded) incremental algorithms to maintain the weighted landmark vectors which are used for incremental maintenance for cached results