CSS Minification via Constraint Solving

Minification is a widely-accepted technique which aims at reducing the size of the code transmitted over the web. We study the problem of minifying Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) --- the de facto language for styling web documents. Traditionally, CSS minifiers focus on simple syntactic transformations (e.g. shortening colour names). In this paper, we propose a new minification method based on merging similar rules in a CSS file. We consider safe transformations of CSS files, which preserve the semantics of the CSS file. The semantics of CSS files are sensitive to the ordering of rules in the file. To automatically identify a rule merging opportunity that best minimises file size, we reduce the rule-merging problem to a problem on CSS-graphs, i.e., node-weighted bipartite graphs with a dependency ordering on the edges, where weights capture the number of characters (e.g. in a selector or in a property declaration). Roughly speaking, the corresponding CSS-graph problem concerns minimising the total weight of a sequence of bicliques (complete bipartite subgraphs) that covers the CSS-graph and respects the edge order. We provide the first full formalisation of CSS3 selectors and reduce dependency detection to satisfiability of quantifier-free integer linear arithmetic, for which highly-optimised SMT-solvers are available. To solve the above NP-hard graph optimisation problem, we show how Max-SAT solvers can be effectively employed. We have implemented our algorithms using Max-SAT and SMT-solvers as backends, and tested against approximately 70 real-world examples (including the top 20 most popular websites). In our benchmarks, our tool yields larger savings than six well-known minifiers (which do not perform rule-merging, but support many other optimisations). Our experiments also suggest that better savings can be achieved in combination with one of these six minifiers

Spécification, validation et satisfiabilité [i.e. satisfaisabilité] de contraintes hybrides par réduction à la logique temporelle

Depuis quelques années, de nombreux champs de l'informatique ont été transformés par l'introduction d'une nouvelle vision de la conception et de l'utilisation d'un système, appelée approche déclarative. Contrairement à l'approche dite impérative, qui consiste à décrire au moyen d'un langage formelles opérations à effectuer pour obtenir un résultat, l'approche déclarative suggère plutôt de décrire le résultat désiré, sans spécifier comment ce «but» doit être atteint. L'approche déclarative peut être vue comme le prolongement d'une tendance ayant cours depuis les débuts de l'informatique et visant à résoudre des problèmes en manipulant des concepts d'un niveau d'abstraction toujours plus élevé. Le passage à un paradigme déclaratif pose cependant certains problèmes: les outils actuels sont peu appropriés à une utilisation déclarative. On identifie trois questions fondamentales qui doivent être résolues pour souscrire à ce nouveau paradigme: l'expression de contraintes dans un langage formel, la validation de ces contraintes sur une structure, et enfin la construction d'une structure satisfaisant une contrainte donnée. Cette thèse étudie ces trois problèmes selon l'angle de la logique mathématique. On verra qu'en utilisant une logique comme fondement formel d'un langage de « buts », les questions de validation et de construction d'une structure se transposent en deux questions mathématiques, le model checking et la satisfiabilité, qui sont fondamentales et largement étudiées. En utilisant comme motivation deux contextes concrets, la gestion de réseaux et les architectures orientées services, le travail montrera qu'il est possible d'utiliser la logique mathématique pour décrire, vérifier et construire des configurations de réseaux ou des compositions de services web. L'aboutissement de la recherche consiste en le développement de la logique CTLFO+, permettant d'exprimer des contraintes sur les données, sur la séquences des opérations\ud d'un système, ainsi que des contraintes dites «hybrides». Une réduction de CTL-FO+ à la logique temporelle CTL permet de réutiliser de manière efficace des outils de vérification existants. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Méthodes formelles, Services web, Réseaux

Performance Optimizations and Operator Semantics for Streaming Data Flow Programs

Unternehmen sammeln mehr Daten als je zuvor und müssen auf diese Informationen zeitnah reagieren. Relationale Datenbanken eignen sich nicht für die latenzfreie Verarbeitung dieser oft unstrukturierten Daten. Um diesen Anforderungen zu begegnen, haben sich in der Datenbankforschung seit dem Anfang der 2000er Jahre zwei neue Forschungsrichtungen etabliert: skalierbare Verarbeitung unstrukturierter Daten und latenzfreie Datenstromverarbeitung. Skalierbare Verarbeitung unstrukturierter Daten, auch bekannt unter dem Begriff "Big Data"-Verarbeitung, hat in der Industrie schnell Einzug erhalten. Gleichzeitig wurden in der Forschung Systeme zur latenzfreien Datenstromverarbeitung entwickelt, die auf eine verteilte Architektur, Skalierbarkeit und datenparallele Verarbeitung setzen. Obwohl diese Systeme in der Industrie vermehrt zum Einsatz kommen, gibt es immer noch große Herausforderungen im praktischen Einsatz. Diese Dissertation verfolgt zwei Hauptziele: Zuerst wird das Laufzeitverhalten von hochskalierbaren datenparallelen Datenstromverarbeitungssystemen untersucht. Im zweiten Hauptteil wird das "Dual Streaming Model" eingeführt, das eine Semantik zur gleichzeitigen Verarbeitung von Datenströmen und Tabellen beschreibt. Das Ziel unserer Untersuchung ist ein besseres Verständnis über das Laufzeitverhalten dieser Systeme zu erhalten und dieses Wissen zu nutzen um Anfragen automatisch ausreichende Rechenkapazität zuzuweisen. Dazu werden ein Kostenmodell und darauf aufbauende Optimierungsalgorithmen für Datenstromanfragen eingeführt, die Datengruppierung und Datenparallelität einbeziehen. Das vorgestellte Datenstromverarbeitungsmodell beschreibt das Ergebnis eines Operators als kontinuierlichen Strom von Veränderugen auf einer Ergebnistabelle. Dabei behandelt unser Modell die Diskrepanz der physikalischen und logischen Ordnung von Datenelementen inhärent und erreicht damit eine deterministische Semantik und eine minimale Verarbeitungslatenz.Modern companies are able to collect more data and require insights from it faster than ever before. Relational databases do not meet the requirements for processing the often unstructured data sets with reasonable performance. The database research community started to address these trends in the early 2000s. Two new research directions have attracted major interest since: large-scale non-relational data processing as well as low-latency data stream processing. Large-scale non-relational data processing, commonly known as "Big Data" processing, was quickly adopted in the industry. In parallel, low latency data stream processing was mainly driven by the research community developing new systems that embrace a distributed architecture, scalability, and exploits data parallelism. While these systems have gained more and more attention in the industry, there are still major challenges to operate them at large scale. The goal of this dissertation is two-fold: First, to investigate runtime characteristics of large scale data-parallel distributed streaming systems. And second, to propose the "Dual Streaming Model" to express semantics of continuous queries over data streams and tables. Our goal is to improve the understanding of system and query runtime behavior with the aim to provision queries automatically. We introduce a cost model for streaming data flow programs taking into account the two techniques of record batching and data parallelization. Additionally, we introduce optimization algorithms that leverage our model for cost-based query provisioning. The proposed Dual Streaming Model expresses the result of a streaming operator as a stream of successive updates to a result table, inducing a duality between streams and tables. Our model handles the inconsistency of the logical and the physical order of records within a data stream natively, which allows for deterministic semantics as well as low latency query execution

An Algebraic Approach to XQuery Optimization

As more data is stored in XML and more applications need to process this data, XML query optimization becomes performance critical. While optimization techniques for relational databases have been developed over the last thirty years, the optimization of XML queries poses new challenges. Query optimizers for XQuery, the standard query language for XML data, need to consider both document order and sequence order. Nevertheless, algebraic optimization proved powerful in query optimizers in relational and object oriented databases. Thus, this dissertation presents an algebraic approach to XQuery optimization. In this thesis, an algebra over sequences is presented that allows for a simple translation of XQuery into this algebra. The formal definitions of the operators in this algebra allow us to reason formally about algebraic optimizations. This thesis leverages the power of this formalism when unnesting nested XQuery expressions. In almost all cases unnesting nested queries in XQuery reduces query execution times from hours to seconds or milliseconds. Moreover, this dissertation presents three basic algebraic patterns of nested queries. For every basic pattern a decision tree is developed to select the most effective unnesting equivalence for a given query. Query unnesting extends the search space that can be considered during cost-based optimization of XQuery. As a result, substantially more efficient query execution plans may be detected. This thesis presents two more important cases where the number of plan alternatives leads to substantially shorter query execution times: join ordering and reordering location steps in path expressions. Our algebraic framework detects cases where document order or sequence order is destroyed. However, state-of-the-art techniques for order optimization in cost-based query optimizers have efficient mechanisms to repair order in these cases. The results obtained for query unnesting and cost-based optimization of XQuery underline the need for an algebraic approach to XQuery optimization for efficient XML query processing. Moreover, they are applicable to optimization in relational databases where order semantics are considered

Transactional and analytical data management on persistent memory

Die zunehmende Anzahl von Smart-Geräten und Sensoren, aber auch die sozialen Medien lassen das Datenvolumen und damit die geforderte Verarbeitungsgeschwindigkeit stetig wachsen. Gleichzeitig müssen viele Anwendungen Daten persistent speichern oder sogar strenge Transaktionsgarantien einhalten. Die neuartige Speichertechnologie Persistent Memory (PMem) mit ihren einzigartigen Eigenschaften scheint ein natürlicher Anwärter zu sein, um diesen Anforderungen effizient nachzukommen. Sie ist im Vergleich zu DRAM skalierbarer, günstiger und dauerhaft. Im Gegensatz zu Disks ist sie deutlich schneller und direkt adressierbar. Daher wird in dieser Dissertation der gezielte Einsatz von PMem untersucht, um den Anforderungen moderner Anwendung gerecht zu werden. Nach der Darlegung der grundlegenden Arbeitsweise von und mit PMem, konzentrieren wir uns primär auf drei Aspekte der Datenverwaltung. Zunächst zerlegen wir mehrere persistente Daten- und Indexstrukturen in ihre zugrundeliegenden Entwurfsprimitive, um Abwägungen für verschiedene Zugriffsmuster aufzuzeigen. So können wir ihre besten Anwendungsfälle und Schwachstellen, aber auch allgemeine Erkenntnisse über das Entwerfen von PMem-basierten Datenstrukturen ermitteln. Zweitens schlagen wir zwei Speicherlayouts vor, die auf analytische Arbeitslasten abzielen und eine effiziente Abfrageausführung auf beliebigen Attributen ermöglichen. Während der erste Ansatz eine verknüpfte Liste von mehrdimensionalen gruppierten Blöcken verwendet, handelt es sich beim zweiten Ansatz um einen mehrdimensionalen Index, der Knoten im DRAM zwischenspeichert. Drittens zeigen wir unter Verwendung der bisherigen Datenstrukturen und Erkenntnisse, wie Datenstrom- und Ereignisverarbeitungssysteme mit transaktionaler Zustandsverwaltung verbessert werden können. Dabei schlagen wir ein neuartiges Transactional Stream Processing (TSP) Modell mit geeigneten Konsistenz- und Nebenläufigkeitsprotokollen vor, die an PMem angepasst sind. Zusammen sollen die diskutierten Aspekte eine Grundlage für die Entwicklung noch ausgereifterer PMem-fähiger Systeme bilden. Gleichzeitig zeigen sie, wie Datenverwaltungsaufgaben PMem ausnutzen können, indem sie neue Anwendungsgebiete erschließen, die Leistung, Skalierbarkeit und Wiederherstellungsgarantien verbessern, die Codekomplexität vereinfachen sowie die ökonomischen und ökologischen Kosten reduzieren.The increasing number of smart devices and sensors, but also social media are causing the volume of data and thus the demanded processing speed to grow steadily. At the same time, many applications need to store data persistently or even comply with strict transactional guarantees. The novel storage technology Persistent Memory (PMem), with its unique properties, seems to be a natural candidate to meet these requirements efficiently. Compared to DRAM, it is more scalable, less expensive, and durable. In contrast to disks, it is significantly faster and directly addressable. Therefore, this dissertation investigates the deliberate employment of PMem to fit the needs of modern applications. After presenting the fundamental work of and with PMem, we focus primarily on three aspects of data management. First, we disassemble several persistent data and index structures into their underlying design primitives to reveal the trade-offs for various access patterns. It allows us to identify their best use cases and vulnerabilities but also to gain general insights into the design of PMem-based data structures. Second, we propose two storage layouts that target analytical workloads and enable an efficient query execution on arbitrary attributes. While the first approach employs a linked list of multi-dimensional clustered blocks that potentially span several storage layers, the second approach is a multi-dimensional index that caches nodes in DRAM. Third, we show how to improve stream and event processing systems involving transactional state management using the preceding data structures and insights. In this context, we propose a novel Transactional Stream Processing (TSP) model with appropriate consistency and concurrency protocols adapted to PMem. Together, the discussed aspects are intended to provide a foundation for developing even more sophisticated PMemenabled systems. At the same time, they show how data management tasks can take advantage of PMem by opening up new application domains, improving performance, scalability, and recovery guarantees, simplifying code complexity, plus reducing economic and environmental costs

Pseudo-contractions as Gentle Repairs

Updating a knowledge base to remove an unwanted consequence is a challenging task. Some of the original sentences must be either deleted or weakened in such a way that the sentence to be removed is no longer entailed by the resulting set. On the other hand, it is desirable that the existing knowledge be preserved as much as possible, minimising the loss of information. Several approaches to this problem can be found in the literature. In particular, when the knowledge is represented by an ontology, two different families of frameworks have been developed in the literature in the past decades with numerous ideas in common but with little interaction between the communities: applications of AGM-like Belief Change and justification-based Ontology Repair. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between pseudo-contraction operations and gentle repairs. Both aim to avoid the complete deletion of sentences when replacing them with weaker versions is enough to prevent the entailment of the unwanted formula. We show the correspondence between concepts on both sides and investigate under which conditions they are equivalent. Furthermore, we propose a unified notation for the two approaches, which might contribute to the integration of the two areas

Keyword-Based Querying for the Social Semantic Web

Enabling non-experts to publish data on the web is an important achievement of the social web and one of the primary goals of the social semantic web. Making the data easily accessible in turn has received only little attention, which is problematic from the point of view of incentives: users are likely to be less motivated to participate in the creation of content if the use of this content is mostly reserved to experts. Querying in semantic wikis, for example, is typically realized in terms of full text search over the textual content and a web query language such as SPARQL for the annotations. This approach has two shortcomings that limit the extent to which data can be leveraged by users: combined queries over content and annotations are not possible, and users either are restricted to expressing their query intent using simple but vague keyword queries or have to learn a complex web query language. The work presented in this dissertation investigates a more suitable form of querying for semantic wikis that consolidates two seemingly conflicting characteristics of query languages, ease of use and expressiveness. This work was carried out in the context of the semantic wiki KiWi, but the underlying ideas apply more generally to the social semantic and social web. We begin by defining a simple modular conceptual model for the KiWi wiki that enables rich and expressive knowledge representation. A component of this model are structured tags, an annotation formalism that is simple yet flexible and expressive, and aims at bridging the gap between atomic tags and RDF. The viability of the approach is confirmed by a user study, which finds that structured tags are suitable for quickly annotating evolving knowledge and are perceived well by the users. The main contribution of this dissertation is the design and implementation of KWQL, a query language for semantic wikis. KWQL combines keyword search and web querying to enable querying that scales with user experience and information need: basic queries are easy to express; as the search criteria become more complex, more expertise is needed to formulate the corresponding query. A novel aspect of KWQL is that it combines both paradigms in a bottom-up fashion. It treats neither of the two as an extension to the other, but instead integrates both in one framework. The language allows for rich combined queries of full text, metadata, document structure, and informal to formal semantic annotations. KWilt, the KWQL query engine, provides the full expressive power of first-order queries, but at the same time can evaluate basic queries at almost the speed of the underlying search engine. KWQL is accompanied by the visual query language visKWQL, and an editor that displays both the textual and visual form of the current query and reflects changes to either representation in the other. A user study shows that participants quickly learn to construct KWQL and visKWQL queries, even when given only a short introduction. KWQL allows users to sift the wealth of structure and annotations in an information system for relevant data. If relevant data constitutes a substantial fraction of all data, ranking becomes important. To this end, we propose PEST, a novel ranking method that propagates relevance among structurally related or similarly annotated data. Extensive experiments, including a user study on a real life wiki, show that pest improves the quality of the ranking over a range of existing ranking approaches