Ontology-based end-user visual query formulation: Why, what, who, how, and which?

Value creation in an organisation is a time-sensitive and data-intensive process, yet it is often delayed and bounded by the reliance on IT experts extracting data for domain experts. Hence, there is a need for providing people who are not professional developers with the flexibility to pose relatively complex and ad hoc queries in an easy and intuitive way. In this respect, visual methods for query formulation undertake the challenge of making querying independent of users’ technical skills and the knowledge of the underlying textual query language and the structure of data. An ontology is more promising than the logical schema of the underlying data for guiding users in formulating queries, since it provides a richer vocabulary closer to the users’ understanding. However, on the one hand, today the most of world’s enterprise data reside in relational databases rather than triple stores, and on the other, visual query formulation has become more compelling due to ever-increasing data size and complexity—known as Big Data. This article presents and argues for ontology-based visual query formulation for end-users; discusses its feasibility in terms of ontology-based data access, which virtualises legacy relational databases as RDF, and the dimensions of Big Data; presents key conceptual aspects and dimensions, challenges, and requirements; and reviews, categorises, and discusses notable approaches and systems

Uso de modelos hipermidia em bibliotecas digitais para dados geograficos

Orientador: Claudia M. Bauzer MedeirosDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de ComputaçãoResumo: Esta dissertação apresenta um modelo e urna metodologia para a construção de bibliotecas digitais. Urna biblioteca digital foi aqui considerada corno sendo uma aplicação hipermídia baseada em um ambiente SGBD Hipermídia Orientado a Objetos. Modelo e metodologia foram empregados na modelagem de urna aplicação específica: urna Biblioteca Digital Geográfica, cujo objetivo é colecionar e prover acesso a uma grande quantidade de dados geográficos e convencionais. A construção desta biblioteca demandou a definição de um conjunto especial de metadados, o qual agrega diversos padrões existentes. A Biblioteca Digital Geográfica contempla dois modos de interação: folheamento (no sentido tradicional) e consulta (suportada pelo SGBD subjacente). Ambos os modos de interação são fortemente integrados no ambiente da biblioteca. O modelo da dissertação integra o modelo do BD OOHDM de Milet et al. com o modelo de Dexter Estendido, aplicando extensões a esta integração. A metodologia estende aquela proposta pelo OOHDM, adaptando-a para permitir a modelagem de bibliotecas digitais. As principais contribuições da dissertação são: a) uma revisão bibliográfica detalhada de requisitos de bibliotecas digitais, de modelos de dados para sistemas e para autoria de aplicações hipermídia, ambas as revisões apresentadas em uma taxonomia unificada; b) um modelo hipermídia orientado a objetos para bibliotecas digitais; c) uma metodologia que usa o modelo para construção de tais bibliotecas; d) uma especificação detalhada de como construir bibliotecas digitais geográficas, usando modelo e metodologia.Abstract: This dissertation presents a model and a methodology for the construction of digital libraries. A digitallibrary was here considered to be a hypermedia application, based on a Object Oriented Hypermedia DBMS environment. Model and methodology were used to model a specific application - a Geographic Digital Library, whose goal is to collect and provide access to a large volume of geographic and conventional data. The construction of this library demanded the definition of a special set of metadata, which aggregates several existing standards. The geographic digitallibrary contemplates two modes of interaction: browsing (in the traditional sense) and querying(supported by the underlying DBMS). The model integrates the OOHDM database model of Milet et al, with the Extended Dexter model, and applies extensions to this integration. The methodology extends the proposal of OOHDM, adapting it to allow modelling of digital libraries. The main contributions of the dissertation are: (a) A detailed survey of requirements of digital libraries, and of hypermedia data and authoring models, presented in a unified taxonomy; (b) An object oriented hypermedia model for digital libraries; (c) A methodology which uses the model for construction of such libraries; and (d) Detailed specification of how to build geographic digital libraries, using model and methodology.MestradoMestre em Ciência da Computaçã

Computational Stylistics in Poetry, Prose, and Drama

The contributions in this edited volume approach poetry, narrative, and drama from the perspective of Computational Stylistics. They exemplify methods of computational textual analysis and explore the possibility of computational generation of literary texts. The volume presents a range of computational and Natural Language Processing applications to literary studies, such as motif detection, network analysis, machine learning, and deep learning

A Study of Information Fragment Association in Information Management and Retrieval Applications

As we strive to identify useful information sifting through the vast number of resources available to us, we often find that the desired information is residing in a small section within a larger body of content which does not necessarily contain similar information. This can make this Information Fragment difficult to find. A Web search engine may not provide a good ranking to a page of unrelated content if it contains only a very small yet invaluable piece of relevant information. This means that our processes often fail to bring together related Information Fragments. We can easily conceive of two Information Fragments which according to a scholar bear a strong association with each other, yet contain no common keywords enabling them to be collocated by a keyword search.This dissertation attempts to address this issue by determining the benefits of enhancing information management and retrieval applications by providing users with the capability of establishing and storing associations between Information Fragments. It estimates the extent to which the efficiency and quality of information retrieval can be improved if users are allowed to capture mental associations they form while reading Information Fragments and share these associations with others using a functional registry-based design. In order to test these benefits three subject groups were recruited and assigned tasks involving Information Fragments. The first two tasks compared the performance and usability of a mainstream social bookmarking tool with a tool enhanced with Information Fragment Association capabilities. The tests demonstrated that the use of Information Fragment Association offers significant advantages both in the efficiency of retrieval and user satisfaction. Analysis of the results of the third task demonstrated that a mainstream Web search engine performed poorly in collocating interrelated fragments when a query designed to retrieve the one of these fragments was submitted. The fourth task demonstrated that Information Fragment Association improves the precision and recall of searches performed on Information Fragment datasets.The results of this study indicate that mainstream information management and retrieval applications provide inadequate support for Information Fragment retrieval and that their enhancement with Information Fragment Association capabilities would be beneficial