A negation query engine for complex query transformations

Natural language interfaces to ontologies allow users to query the system using natural language queries. These systems take natural language query as input and transform it to formal query language equivalent to retrieve the desired information from ontologies. The existing natural language interfaces to ontologies offer support for handling negation queries; however, they offer limited support for dealing with them. This paper proposes a negation query handling engine which can handle relatively complex natural language queries than the existing systems. The proposed engine effectively understands the intent of the user query on the basis of a sophisticated algorithm, which is governed by a set of techniques and transformation rules. The proposed engine was evaluated using the Mooney data set and AquaLog dataset, and it manifested encouraging results

Inferring user goals from sets of independent queries in a multidatabase environment

Loosely coupled data integration among networked sources has become so ubiquitous over the recent years that many of the services and applications used daily are actually not monolithic information systems but rather collections of sources tied together. Instead of building centralized and large data sources (i.e., the Extract- Transform-Load method), many organizations and individuals are opting for a virtual database approach. Especially along with the advent of service-oriented architectures, it has become very easy to leave data in its original source and to instead recruit the service provided by that source as needed. This structure is seen in a variety of scenarios such as hybrid web applications (mash-ups), enterprise information integration models, aggregation services and federated information retrieval systems. Furthermore, individual users are often forced to procure and assemble the information they need from sources distributed across a network. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

Algorithms for generation of path-methods in object-oriented databases

A path-method is a mechanism in object-oriented databases (OODBs) to retrieve or to update information relevant to one class that is not stored with that class but with some other class. A path-method is a method which traverses from one class through a chain of connections between classes to access information at another class. However, it is a difficult task for a user to write path-methods, because it might require comprehensive knowledge of many classes of the conceptual schema, while a typical user has often incomplete or even inconsistent knowledge of the schema. This dissertation proposes an approach to the generation of path-methods in an OODB to solve this problem. We have developed the Path-Method Generator (P MG) system, which generates path-methods according to a naive user\u27s requests. PMG is based on access weights which reflect the relative frequency of the connections and precomputed access relevance between every pair of classes of the OODB computed from access weights of the connections. We present specific rules for access weight assignment, efficient algorithms to compute access relevance in a single OODB, and a variety of traversal algorithms based on access weights and precomputed access relevance. Experiments with a university environment OODB and a sample of path-methods identify some of these algorithms as very successful in generating most of the desired path-methods. Thus, the PMG system is an efficient tool for aiding the user with the difficult task of querying and updating a large OODB. The path-method generation in an interoperable multi object-oriented database (IM-OODB) is even more difficult than for a single OODB, since a user has to be familiar with several OODBs. We use a hierarchical approach for deriving efficient online algorithms for the computation of access relevance in an IM-OODB, based on precomputed access relevance for each autonomous OODB. In an IM-OODB the access relevance is used as guide in generating path-methods between the classes of different OODBs