XML Matchers: approaches and challenges

Schema Matching, i.e. the process of discovering semantic correspondences between concepts adopted in different data source schemas, has been a key topic in Database and Artificial Intelligence research areas for many years. In the past, it was largely investigated especially for classical database models (e.g., E/R schemas, relational databases, etc.). However, in the latest years, the widespread adoption of XML in the most disparate application fields pushed a growing number of researchers to design XML-specific Schema Matching approaches, called XML Matchers, aiming at finding semantic matchings between concepts defined in DTDs and XSDs. XML Matchers do not just take well-known techniques originally designed for other data models and apply them on DTDs/XSDs, but they exploit specific XML features (e.g., the hierarchical structure of a DTD/XSD) to improve the performance of the Schema Matching process. The design of XML Matchers is currently a well-established research area. The main goal of this paper is to provide a detailed description and classification of XML Matchers. We first describe to what extent the specificities of DTDs/XSDs impact on the Schema Matching task. Then we introduce a template, called XML Matcher Template, that describes the main components of an XML Matcher, their role and behavior. We illustrate how each of these components has been implemented in some popular XML Matchers. We consider our XML Matcher Template as the baseline for objectively comparing approaches that, at first glance, might appear as unrelated. The introduction of this template can be useful in the design of future XML Matchers. Finally, we analyze commercial tools implementing XML Matchers and introduce two challenging issues strictly related to this topic, namely XML source clustering and uncertainty management in XML Matchers.Comment: 34 pages, 8 tables, 7 figure

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationServing as a record of what happened during a scientific process, often computational, provenance has become an important piece of computing. The importance of archiving not only data and results but also the lineage of these entities has led to a variety of systems that capture provenance as well as models and schemas for this information. Despite significant work focused on obtaining and modeling provenance, there has been little work on managing and using this information. Using the provenance from past work, it is possible to mine common computational structure or determine differences between executions. Such information can be used to suggest possible completions for partial workflows, summarize a set of approaches, or extend past work in new directions. These applications require infrastructure to support efficient queries and accessible reuse. In order to support knowledge discovery and reuse from provenance information, the management of those data is important. One component of provenance is the specification of the computations; workflows provide structured abstractions of code and are commonly used for complex tasks. Using change-based provenance, it is possible to store large numbers of similar workflows compactly. This storage also allows efficient computation of differences between specifications. However, querying for specific structure across a large collection of workflows is difficult because comparing graphs depends on computing subgraph isomorphism which is NP-Complete. Graph indexing methods identify features that help distinguish graphs of a collection to filter results for a subgraph containment query and reduce the number of subgraph isomorphism computations. For provenance, this work extends these methods to work for more exploratory queries and collections with significant overlap. However, comparing workflow or provenance graphs may not require exact equality; a match between two graphs may allow paired nodes to be similar yet not equivalent. This work presents techniques to better correlate graphs to help summarize collections. Using this infrastructure, provenance can be reused so that users can learn from their own and others' history. Just as textual search has been augmented with suggested completions based on past or common queries, provenance can be used to suggest how computations can be completed or which steps might connect to a given subworkflow. In addition, provenance can help further science by accelerating publication and reuse. By incorporating provenance into publications, authors can more easily integrate their results, and readers can more easily verify and repeat results. However, reusing past computations requires maintaining stronger associations with any input data and underlying code as well as providing paths for migrating old work to new hardware or algorithms. This work presents a framework for maintaining data and code as well as supporting upgrades for workflow computations

JGraphT -- A Java library for graph data structures and algorithms

Mathematical software and graph-theoretical algorithmic packages to efficiently model, analyze and query graphs are crucial in an era where large-scale spatial, societal and economic network data are abundantly available. One such package is JGraphT, a programming library which contains very efficient and generic graph data-structures along with a large collection of state-of-the-art algorithms. The library is written in Java with stability, interoperability and performance in mind. A distinctive feature of this library is the ability to model vertices and edges as arbitrary objects, thereby permitting natural representations of many common networks including transportation, social and biological networks. Besides classic graph algorithms such as shortest-paths and spanning-tree algorithms, the library contains numerous advanced algorithms: graph and subgraph isomorphism; matching and flow problems; approximation algorithms for NP-hard problems such as independent set and TSP; and several more exotic algorithms such as Berge graph detection. Due to its versatility and generic design, JGraphT is currently used in large-scale commercial, non-commercial and academic research projects. In this work we describe in detail the design and underlying structure of the library, and discuss its most important features and algorithms. A computational study is conducted to evaluate the performance of JGraphT versus a number of similar libraries. Experiments on a large number of graphs over a variety of popular algorithms show that JGraphT is highly competitive with other established libraries such as NetworkX or the BGL.Comment: Major Revisio

Wrapping of Web Sources with restricted Query Interfaces by Query Tunneling

AbstractInformation sources in the World Wide Web usually offer two different schemes to their users, an Interface Schema which the user can query and a Result Schema which the user can browse. Often the Interface Schema is more restricted than the Result Schema, moreover many sources offer keyword-search interfaces only. Thus query capabilities of such sources are very small and a useful integration into a mediator-based information system using query capabilities is almost impossible. We propose the Query Tunnelling architecture for the wrapping of these restricted web sources. Wrapping of sources by Query Tunneling hides restrictive query interfaces and makes such sources fully queryable based on their result schema. The process of Query Tunneling is divided into two main steps, Query Relaxation to make a higher order query suitable to a restricted interface and Result Restriction in order to filter the results using the original query

The Family of MapReduce and Large Scale Data Processing Systems

In the last two decades, the continuous increase of computational power has produced an overwhelming flow of data which has called for a paradigm shift in the computing architecture and large scale data processing mechanisms. MapReduce is a simple and powerful programming model that enables easy development of scalable parallel applications to process vast amounts of data on large clusters of commodity machines. It isolates the application from the details of running a distributed program such as issues on data distribution, scheduling and fault tolerance. However, the original implementation of the MapReduce framework had some limitations that have been tackled by many research efforts in several followup works after its introduction. This article provides a comprehensive survey for a family of approaches and mechanisms of large scale data processing mechanisms that have been implemented based on the original idea of the MapReduce framework and are currently gaining a lot of momentum in both research and industrial communities. We also cover a set of introduced systems that have been implemented to provide declarative programming interfaces on top of the MapReduce framework. In addition, we review several large scale data processing systems that resemble some of the ideas of the MapReduce framework for different purposes and application scenarios. Finally, we discuss some of the future research directions for implementing the next generation of MapReduce-like solutions.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1105.4252 by other author

Querying and creating visualizations by analogy

Journal ArticleWhile there have been advances in visualization systems, particularly in multi-view visualizations and visual exploration, the process of building visualizations remains a major bottleneck in data exploration. We show that provenance metadata collected during the creation of pipelines can be reused to suggest similar content in related visualizations and guide semi-automated changes. We introduce the idea of query-by-example in the context of an ensemble of visualizations, and the use of analogies as first-class operations in a system to guide scalable interactions. We describe an implementation of these techniques in VisTrails, a publicly-available, open-source system

Vermeidung von Repräsentationsheterogenitäten in realweltlichen Wissensgraphen

Knowledge graphs are repositories providing factual knowledge about entities. They are a great source of knowledge to support modern AI applications for Web search, question answering, digital assistants, and online shopping. The advantages of machine learning techniques and the Web's growth have led to colossal knowledge graphs with billions of facts about hundreds of millions of entities collected from a large variety of sources. While integrating independent knowledge sources promises rich information, it inherently leads to heterogeneities in representation due to a large variety of different conceptualizations. Thus, real-world knowledge graphs are threatened in their overall utility. Due to their sheer size, they are hardly manually curatable anymore. Automatic and semi-automatic methods are needed to cope with these vast knowledge repositories. We first address the general topic of representation heterogeneity by surveying the problem throughout various data-intensive fields: databases, ontologies, and knowledge graphs. Different techniques for automatically resolving heterogeneity issues are presented and discussed, while several open problems are identified. Next, we focus on entity heterogeneity. We show that automatic matching techniques may run into quality problems when working in a multi-knowledge graph scenario due to incorrect transitive identity links. We present four techniques that can be used to improve the quality of arbitrary entity matching tools significantly. Concerning relation heterogeneity, we show that synonymous relations in knowledge graphs pose several difficulties in querying. Therefore, we resolve these heterogeneities with knowledge graph embeddings and by Horn rule mining. All methods detect synonymous relations in knowledge graphs with high quality. Furthermore, we present a novel technique for avoiding heterogeneity issues at query time using implicit knowledge storage. We show that large neural language models are a valuable source of knowledge that is queried similarly to knowledge graphs already solving several heterogeneity issues internally.Wissensgraphen sind eine wichtige Datenquelle von Entitätswissen. Sie unterstützen viele moderne KI-Anwendungen. Dazu gehören unter anderem Websuche, die automatische Beantwortung von Fragen, digitale Assistenten und Online-Shopping. Neue Errungenschaften im maschinellen Lernen und das außerordentliche Wachstum des Internets haben zu riesigen Wissensgraphen geführt. Diese umfassen häufig Milliarden von Fakten über Hunderte von Millionen von Entitäten; häufig aus vielen verschiedenen Quellen. Während die Integration unabhängiger Wissensquellen zu einer großen Informationsvielfalt führen kann, führt sie inhärent zu Heterogenitäten in der Wissensrepräsentation. Diese Heterogenität in den Daten gefährdet den praktischen Nutzen der Wissensgraphen. Durch ihre Größe lassen sich die Wissensgraphen allerdings nicht mehr manuell bereinigen. Dafür werden heutzutage häufig automatische und halbautomatische Methoden benötigt. In dieser Arbeit befassen wir uns mit dem Thema Repräsentationsheterogenität. Wir klassifizieren Heterogenität entlang verschiedener Dimensionen und erläutern Heterogenitätsprobleme in Datenbanken, Ontologien und Wissensgraphen. Weiterhin geben wir einen knappen Überblick über verschiedene Techniken zur automatischen Lösung von Heterogenitätsproblemen. Im nächsten Kapitel beschäftigen wir uns mit Entitätsheterogenität. Wir zeigen Probleme auf, die in einem Multi-Wissensgraphen-Szenario aufgrund von fehlerhaften transitiven Links entstehen. Um diese Probleme zu lösen stellen wir vier Techniken vor, mit denen sich die Qualität beliebiger Entity-Alignment-Tools deutlich verbessern lässt. Wir zeigen, dass Relationsheterogenität in Wissensgraphen zu Problemen bei der Anfragenbeantwortung führen kann. Daher entwickeln wir verschiedene Methoden um synonyme Relationen zu finden. Eine der Methoden arbeitet mit hochdimensionalen Wissensgrapheinbettungen, die andere mit einem Rule Mining Ansatz. Beide Methoden können synonyme Relationen in Wissensgraphen mit hoher Qualität erkennen. Darüber hinaus stellen wir eine neuartige Technik zur Vermeidung von Heterogenitätsproblemen vor, bei der wir eine implizite Wissensrepräsentation verwenden. Wir zeigen, dass große neuronale Sprachmodelle eine wertvolle Wissensquelle sind, die ähnlich wie Wissensgraphen angefragt werden können. Im Sprachmodell selbst werden bereits viele der Heterogenitätsprobleme aufgelöst, so dass eine Anfrage heterogener Wissensgraphen möglich wird