920 research outputs found
Web and Semantic Web Query Languages
A number of techniques have been developed to facilitate
powerful data retrieval on the Web and Semantic Web. Three categories
of Web query languages can be distinguished, according to the format
of the data they can retrieve: XML, RDF and Topic Maps. This article
introduces the spectrum of languages falling into these categories
and summarises their salient aspects. The languages are introduced using
common sample data and query types. Key aspects of the query
languages considered are stressed in a conclusion
Modular Web Queries — From Rules to Stores
Even with all the progress in Semantic technology, accessing Web
data remains a challenging issue with new Web query languages and approaches
appearing regularly. Yet most of these languages, including W3C approaches
such as XQuery and SPARQL, do little to cope with the explosion of the data
size and schemata diversity and richness on the Web. In this paper we propose
a straightforward step toward the improvement of this situation that is simple to
realize and yet effective: Advanced module systems that make partitioning of (a)
the evaluation and (b) the conceptual design of complex Web queries possible.
They provide the query programmer with a powerful, but easy to use high-level
abstraction for packaging, encapsulating, and reusing conceptually related parts
(in our case, rules) of a Web query. The proposed module system combines ease
of use thanks to a simple core concept, the partitioning of rules and their consequences
in flexible “stores”, with ease of deployment thanks to a reduction
semantics. We focus on extending the rule-based Semantic Web query language
Xcerpt with such a module system though the same approach can be applied to
other (rule-based) languages as well
Survey over Existing Query and Transformation Languages
A widely acknowledged obstacle for realizing the vision of the Semantic Web is the inability
of many current Semantic Web approaches to cope with data available in such diverging
representation formalisms as XML, RDF, or Topic Maps. A common query language is the first
step to allow transparent access to data in any of these formats. To further the understanding
of the requirements and approaches proposed for query languages in the conventional as well
as the Semantic Web, this report surveys a large number of query languages for accessing
XML, RDF, or Topic Maps. This is the first systematic survey to consider query languages from
all these areas. From the detailed survey of these query languages, a common classification
scheme is derived that is useful for understanding and differentiating languages within and
among all three areas
Four Lessons in Versatility or How Query Languages Adapt to the Web
Exposing not only human-centered information, but machine-processable data on the Web is one of the commonalities of recent Web trends. It has enabled a new kind of applications and businesses where the data is used in ways not foreseen by the data providers. Yet this exposition has fractured the Web into islands of data, each in different Web formats: Some providers choose XML, others RDF, again others JSON or OWL, for their data, even in similar domains. This fracturing stifles innovation as application builders have to cope not only with one Web stack (e.g., XML technology) but with several ones, each of considerable complexity. With Xcerpt we have developed a rule- and pattern based query language that aims to give shield application builders from much of this complexity: In a single query language XML and RDF data can be accessed, processed, combined, and re-published. Though the need for combined access to XML and RDF data has been recognized in previous work (including the W3C’s GRDDL), our approach differs in four main aspects: (1) We provide a single language (rather than two separate or embedded languages), thus minimizing the conceptual overhead of dealing with disparate data formats. (2) Both the declarative (logic-based) and the operational semantics are unified in that they apply for querying XML and RDF in the same way. (3) We show that the resulting query language can be implemented reusing traditional database technology, if desirable. Nevertheless, we also give a unified evaluation approach based on interval labelings of graphs that is at least as fast as existing approaches for tree-shaped XML data, yet provides linear time and space querying also for many RDF graphs. We believe that Web query languages are the right tool for declarative data access in Web applications and that Xcerpt is a significant step towards a more convenient, yet highly efficient data access in a “Web of Data”
Towards MKM in the Large: Modular Representation and Scalable Software Architecture
MKM has been defined as the quest for technologies to manage mathematical
knowledge. MKM "in the small" is well-studied, so the real problem is to scale
up to large, highly interconnected corpora: "MKM in the large". We contend that
advances in two areas are needed to reach this goal. We need representation
languages that support incremental processing of all primitive MKM operations,
and we need software architectures and implementations that implement these
operations scalably on large knowledge bases.
We present instances of both in this paper: the MMT framework for modular
theory-graphs that integrates meta-logical foundations, which forms the base of
the next OMDoc version; and TNTBase, a versioned storage system for XML-based
document formats. TNTBase becomes an MMT database by instantiating it with
special MKM operations for MMT.Comment: To appear in The 9th International Conference on Mathematical
Knowledge Management: MKM 201
A Query Integrator and Manager for the Query Web
We introduce two concepts: the Query Web as a layer of interconnected queries over the document web and the semantic web, and a Query Web Integrator and Manager (QI) that enables the Query Web to evolve. QI permits users to write, save and reuse queries over any web accessible source, including other queries saved in other installations of QI. The saved queries may be in any language (e.g. SPARQL, XQuery); the only condition for interconnection is that the queries return their results in some form of XML. This condition allows queries to chain off each other, and to be written in whatever language is appropriate for the task. We illustrate the potential use of QI for several biomedical use cases, including ontology view generation using a combination of graph-based and logical approaches, value set generation for clinical data management, image annotation using terminology obtained from an ontology web service, ontology-driven brain imaging data integration, small-scale clinical data integration, and wider-scale clinical data integration. Such use cases illustrate the current range of applications of QI and lead us to speculate about the potential evolution from smaller groups of interconnected queries into a larger query network that layers over the document and semantic web. The resulting Query Web could greatly aid researchers and others who now have to manually navigate through multiple information sources in order to answer specific questions
State-of-the-art on evolution and reactivity
This report starts by, in Chapter 1, outlining aspects of querying and updating resources on
the Web and on the Semantic Web, including the development of query and update languages
to be carried out within the Rewerse project.
From this outline, it becomes clear that several existing research areas and topics are of
interest for this work in Rewerse. In the remainder of this report we further present state of
the art surveys in a selection of such areas and topics. More precisely: in Chapter 2 we give
an overview of logics for reasoning about state change and updates; Chapter 3 is devoted to briefly describing existing update languages for the Web, and also for updating logic programs;
in Chapter 4 event-condition-action rules, both in the context of active database systems and
in the context of semistructured data, are surveyed; in Chapter 5 we give an overview of some relevant rule-based agents frameworks
An Expressive Language and Efficient Execution System for Software Agents
Software agents can be used to automate many of the tedious, time-consuming
information processing tasks that humans currently have to complete manually.
However, to do so, agent plans must be capable of representing the myriad of
actions and control flows required to perform those tasks. In addition, since
these tasks can require integrating multiple sources of remote information ?
typically, a slow, I/O-bound process ? it is desirable to make execution as
efficient as possible. To address both of these needs, we present a flexible
software agent plan language and a highly parallel execution system that enable
the efficient execution of expressive agent plans. The plan language allows
complex tasks to be more easily expressed by providing a variety of operators
for flexibly processing the data as well as supporting subplans (for
modularity) and recursion (for indeterminate looping). The executor is based on
a streaming dataflow model of execution to maximize the amount of operator and
data parallelism possible at runtime. We have implemented both the language and
executor in a system called THESEUS. Our results from testing THESEUS show that
streaming dataflow execution can yield significant speedups over both
traditional serial (von Neumann) as well as non-streaming dataflow-style
execution that existing software and robot agent execution systems currently
support. In addition, we show how plans written in the language we present can
represent certain types of subtasks that cannot be accomplished using the
languages supported by network query engines. Finally, we demonstrate that the
increased expressivity of our plan language does not hamper performance;
specifically, we show how data can be integrated from multiple remote sources
just as efficiently using our architecture as is possible with a
state-of-the-art streaming-dataflow network query engine
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