Archiving scientific data

We present an archiving technique for hierarchical data with key structure. Our approach is based on the notion of timestamps whereby an element appearing in multiple versions of the database is stored only once along with a compact description of versions in which it appears. The basic idea of timestamping was discovered by Driscoll et. al. in the context of persistent data structures where one wishes to track the sequences of changes made to a data structure. We extend this idea to develop an archiving tool for XML data that is capable of providing meaningful change descriptions and can also efficiently support a variety of basic functions concerning the evolution of data such as retrieval of any specific version from the archive and querying the temporal history of any element. This is in contrast to diff-based approaches where such operations may require undoing a large number of changes or significant reasoning with the deltas. Surprisingly, our archiving technique does not incur any significant space overhead when contrasted with other approaches. Our experimental results support this and also show that the compacted archive file interacts well with other compression techniques. Finally, another useful property of our approach is that the resulting archive is also in XML and hence can directly leverage existing XML tools

Quasi-SLCA based Keyword Query Processing over Probabilistic XML Data

The probabilistic threshold query is one of the most common queries in uncertain databases, where a result satisfying the query must be also with probability meeting the threshold requirement. In this paper, we investigate probabilistic threshold keyword queries (PrTKQ) over XML data, which is not studied before. We first introduce the notion of quasi-SLCA and use it to represent results for a PrTKQ with the consideration of possible world semantics. Then we design a probabilistic inverted (PI) index that can be used to quickly return the qualified answers and filter out the unqualified ones based on our proposed lower/upper bounds. After that, we propose two efficient and comparable algorithms: Baseline Algorithm and PI index-based Algorithm. To accelerate the performance of algorithms, we also utilize probability density function. An empirical study using real and synthetic data sets has verified the effectiveness and the efficiency of our approaches

A Database Approach to Content-based XML retrieval

This paper describes a rst prototype system for content-based retrieval from XML data. The system's design supports both XPath queries and complex information retrieval queries based on a language modelling approach to information retrieval. Evaluation using the INEX benchmark shows that it is beneficial if the system is biased to retrieve large XML fragments over small fragments

Designing a resource-efficient data structure for mobile data systems

Designing data structures for use in mobile devices requires attention on optimising data volumes with associated benefits for data transmission, storage space and battery use. For semi-structured data, tree summarisation techniques can be used to reduce the volume of structured elements while dictionary compression can efficiently deal with value-based predicates. This project seeks to investigate and evaluate an integration of the two approaches. The key strength of this technique is that both structural and value predicates could be resolved within one graph while further allowing for compression of the resulting data structure. As the current trend is towards the requirement for working with larger semi-structured data sets this work would allow for the utilisation of much larger data sets whilst reducing requirements on bandwidth and minimising the memory necessary both for the storage and querying of the data

Semantics-Based Content Extraction in Typewritten Historical Documents

This paper presents a flexible approach to extracting content from scanned historical documents using semantic information. The final electronic document is the result of a "digital historical document lifecycle" process, where the expert knowledge of the historian/archivist user is incorporated at different stages. Results show that such a conversion strategy aided by (expert) user-specified semantic information and which enables the processing of individual parts of the document in a specialised way, produces superior (in a variety of significant ways) results than document analysis and understanding techniques devised for contemporary documents

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

AMaχoS—Abstract Machine for Xcerpt

Web query languages promise convenient and efficient access to Web data such as XML, RDF, or Topic Maps. Xcerpt is one such Web query language with strong emphasis on novel high-level constructs for effective and convenient query authoring, particularly tailored to versatile access to data in different Web formats such as XML or RDF. However, so far it lacks an efficient implementation to supplement the convenient language features. AMaχoS is an abstract machine implementation for Xcerpt that aims at efficiency and ease of deployment. It strictly separates compilation and execution of queries: Queries are compiled once to abstract machine code that consists in (1) a code segment with instructions for evaluating each rule and (2) a hint segment that provides the abstract machine with optimization hints derived by the query compilation. This article summarizes the motivation and principles behind AMaχoS and discusses how its current architecture realizes these principles