reSearch : enhancing information retrieval with images

Combining image and text search is an open research question. The main issues are what technologies to base this solution on, and what measures of relevance to employ. Our reSearch prototype mashes up papers indexed using information retrieval techniques (Terrier) with Google image search for faces and Google book search. The user can interactively employ query expansion with additional terms suggested by Terrier, and use those terms to expand both the text and image search. We test this solution with a selection of recent publications and queries concerning people engaged in research. We report on the effectiveness of this solution. It seems that the combination works to a large extent, as testified by our observations

Generic Proxies - Supporting Data Integration Inside the Database

Existing approaches to data integration generally propose building a layer on top of database systems to perform the necessary data transformations and manage data consistency. We show how support for the integration of heterogeneous data sources can instead be built into a database system through the introduction of a generic proxy concept

Generic Proxies-Supporting Data Integration Inside the Database

Abstract. Existing approaches to data integration generally propose building a layer on top of database systems to perform the necessary data transformations and manage data consistency. We show how support for the integration of heterogeneous data sources can instead be built into a database system through the introduction of a generic proxy concept. Over the last two decades a great deal of research in the database and information systems communities has addressed the challenges of data integration. Generally, the problem addressed is how to combine data from different sources to provide a unified user view In our approach, the integration of external information sources is done using a generic proxy. A generic proxy consists of two parts: the proxy object and the proxy process. The proxy object represents the database view of the external data source. The data from the external source is cached locally, similar to the data warehouse approach. Queries can be executed locally without any communication to the external source. The synchronisation between the database view of the information source and the external information source is done automatically by the database management system in a transparent way. We have defined a proxy programming interface that allows the user to specify how a proxy object interacts with an external source. The user has to write different implementations for different types of external sources. The proxy processes are created from particular implementations of the proxy interface. When a user wants to create a new proxy object, they must specify the name of the proxy and also the list of arguments that are needed in order to initialize the generic proxy. First, a new proxy object is created and stored in the database. Afterwards, the proxy object must be associated with an existing or newly created proxy process. This association is performed using a chain of responsibility approach. All of the existing proxy processes pertaining to the current prox