On-line analytical processing

On-line analytical processing (OLAP) describes an approach to decision support, which aims to extract knowledge from a data warehouse, or more specifically, from data marts. Its main idea is providing navigation through data to non-expert users, so that they are able to interactively generate ad hoc queries without the intervention of IT professionals. This name was introduced in contrast to on-line transactional processing (OLTP), so that it reflected the different requirements and characteristics between these classes of uses. The concept falls in the area of business intelligence.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

EAGLE—A Scalable Query Processing Engine for Linked Sensor Data

Recently, many approaches have been proposed to manage sensor data using semantic web technologies for effective heterogeneous data integration. However, our empirical observations revealed that these solutions primarily focused on semantic relationships and unfortunately paid less attention to spatio–temporal correlations. Most semantic approaches do not have spatio–temporal support. Some of them have attempted to provide full spatio–temporal support, but have poor performance for complex spatio–temporal aggregate queries. In addition, while the volume of sensor data is rapidly growing, the challenge of querying and managing the massive volumes of data generated by sensing devices still remains unsolved. In this article, we introduce EAGLE, a spatio–temporal query engine for querying sensor data based on the linked data model. The ultimate goal of EAGLE is to provide an elastic and scalable system which allows fast searching and analysis with respect to the relationships of space, time and semantics in sensor data. We also extend SPARQL with a set of new query operators in order to support spatio–temporal computing in the linked sensor data context.EC/H2020/732679/EU/ACTivating InnoVative IoT smart living environments for AGEing well/ACTIVAGEEC/H2020/661180/EU/A Scalable and Elastic Platform for Near-Realtime Analytics for The Graph of Everything/SMARTE

Composition of context aware mobile services using a semantic context model

Context-awareness has been regarded as an important feature for mobile services. However, only a few services are sensible to context and the features that are context-aware are still limited. Composition of Web services has received much interest in business-to-business or enterprise application, but not so much interest in business-to- consumer applications. This paper presents iCas, a novel architecture that enables the creation of context-aware services on the fly, and discusses its main components. We compare our approach with similar systems and point out the main differences and advantages. To explore context-awareness to support service composition, iCas uses SeCoM, a semantic model to represent context. The main parts of this model are explained as well the advantages of using a semantic model to represent context. We also describe the use of our approach in an university campus to provide pedagogical features and assist the socio-pedagogical interaction of various types of users

DCMS: A data analytics and management system for molecular simulation

Molecular Simulation (MS) is a powerful tool for studying physical/chemical features of large systems and has seen applications in many scientific and engineering domains. During the simulation process, the experiments generate a very large number of atoms and intend to observe their spatial and temporal relationships for scientific analysis. The sheer data volumes and their intensive interactions impose significant challenges for data accessing, managing, and analysis. To date, existing MS software systems fall short on storage and handling of MS data, mainly because of the missing of a platform to support applications that involve intensive data access and analytical process. In this paper, we present the database-centric molecular simulation (DCMS) system our team developed in the past few years. The main idea behind DCMS is to store MS data in a relational database management system (DBMS) to take advantage of the declarative query interface (i.e., SQL), data access methods, query processing, and optimization mechanisms of modern DBMSs. A unique challenge is to handle the analytical queries that are often compute-intensive. For that, we developed novel indexing and query processing strategies (including algorithms running on modern co-processors) as integrated components of the DBMS. As a result, researchers can upload and analyze their data using efficient functions implemented inside the DBMS. Index structures are generated to store analysis results that may be interesting to other users, so that the results are readily available without duplicating the analysis. We have developed a prototype of DCMS based on the PostgreSQL system and experiments using real MS data and workload show that DCMS significantly outperforms existing MS software systems. We also used it as a platform to test other data management issues such as security and compression

Interacting with Statistical Linked Data via OLAP Operations

Abstract. Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) promises an interface to analyse Linked Data containing statistics going beyond other interaction paradigms such as follow-your-nose browsers, faceted-search interfaces and query builders. Transforming statistical Linked Data into a star schema to populate a relational database and applying a common OLAP engine do not allow to optimise OLAP queries on RDF or to directly propagate changes of Linked Data sources to clients. Therefore, as a new way to interact with statistics published as Linked Data, we investigate the problem of executing OLAP queries via SPARQL on an RDF store. For that, we first define projection, slice, dice and roll-up operations on single data cubes published as Linked Data reusing the RDF Data Cube vocabulary and show how a nested set of operations lead to an OLAP query. Second, we show how to transform an OLAP query to a SPARQL query which generates all required tuples from the data cube. In a small experiment, we show the applicability of our OLAPto-SPARQL mapping in answering a business question in the financial domain

Explora : interactive querying of multidimensional data in the context of smart cities

Citizen engagement is one of the key factors for smart city initiatives to remain sustainable over time. This in turn entails providing citizens and other relevant stakeholders with the latest data and tools that enable them to derive insights that add value to their day-to-day life. The massive volume of data being constantly produced in these smart city environments makes satisfying this requirement particularly challenging. This paper introduces Explora, a generic framework for serving interactive low-latency requests, typical of visual exploratory applications on spatiotemporal data, which leverages the stream processing for deriving-on ingestion time-synopsis data structures that concisely capture the spatial and temporal trends and dynamics of the sensed variables and serve as compacted data sets to provide fast (approximate) answers to visual queries on smart city data. The experimental evaluation conducted on proof-of-concept implementations of Explora, based on traditional database and distributed data processing setups, accounts for a decrease of up to 2 orders of magnitude in query latency compared to queries running on the base raw data at the expense of less than 10% query accuracy and 30% data footprint. The implementation of the framework on real smart city data along with the obtained experimental results prove the feasibility of the proposed approach

SOWL QL: Querying Spatio - Temporal Ontologies in OWL

We introduce SOWL QL, a query language for spatio-temporal information in ontologies. Buildingupon SOWL (Spatio-Temporal OWL), an ontology for handling spatio-temporal information in OWL, SOWL QL supports querying over qualitative spatio-temporal information (expressed using natural language expressions such as “before”, “after”, “north of”, “south of”) rather than merely quantitative information (exact dates, times, locations). SOWL QL extends SPARQL with a powerful set of temporal and spatial operators, including temporal Allen topological, spatial directional and topological operations or combinations of the above. SOWL QL maintains simplicity of expression and also, upward and downward compatibility with SPARQL. Query translation in SOWL QL yields SPARQL queries implying that, querying spatio-temporal ontologies using SPARQL is still feasible but suffers from several drawbacks the most important of them being that, queries in SPARQL become particularly complicated and users must be familiar with the underlying spatio-temporal representation (the “N-ary relations” or the “4D-fluents” approach in this work). Finally, querying in SOWL QL is supported by the SOWL reasoner which is not part of the standard SPARQL translation. The run-time performance of SOWL QL has been assessed experimentally in a real data setting. A critical analysis of its performance is also presented

OnGIS: Semantic Query Broker for Heterogeneous Geospatial Data Sources

Querying geospatial data from multiple heterogeneous sources backed by different management technologies poses an interesting problem in the data integration and in the subsequent result interpretation. This paper proposes broker techniques for answering a user's complex spatial query: finding relevant data sources (from a catalogue of data sources) capable of answering the query, eventually splitting the query and finding relevant data sources for the query parts, when no single source suffices. For the purpose, we describe each source with a set of prototypical queries that are algorithmically arranged into a lattice, which makes searching efficient. The proposed algorithms leverage GeoSPARQL query containment enhanced with OWL 2 QL semantics. A prototype is implemented in a system called OnGIS