9,513 research outputs found
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
Identification of Design Principles
This report identifies those design principles for a (possibly new) query and transformation
language for the Web supporting inference that are considered essential. Based upon these
design principles an initial strawman is selected. Scenarios for querying the Semantic Web
illustrate the design principles and their reflection in the initial strawman, i.e., a first draft of
the query language to be designed and implemented by the REWERSE working group I4
An Inflationary Fixed Point Operator in XQuery
We introduce a controlled form of recursion in XQuery, inflationary fixed
points, familiar in the context of relational databases. This imposes
restrictions on the expressible types of recursion, but we show that
inflationary fixed points nevertheless are sufficiently versatile to capture a
wide range of interesting use cases, including the semantics of Regular XPath
and its core transitive closure construct.
While the optimization of general user-defined recursive functions in XQuery
appears elusive, we will describe how inflationary fixed points can be
efficiently evaluated, provided that the recursive XQuery expressions exhibit a
distributivity property. We show how distributivity can be assessed both,
syntactically and algebraically, and provide experimental evidence that XQuery
processors can substantially benefit during inflationary fixed point
evaluation.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, 2 table
06472 Abstracts Collection - XQuery Implementation Paradigms
From 19.11.2006 to 22.11.2006, the Dagstuhl Seminar 06472 ``XQuery Implementation Paradigms'' was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available
Faster Query Answering in Probabilistic Databases using Read-Once Functions
A boolean expression is in read-once form if each of its variables appears
exactly once. When the variables denote independent events in a probability
space, the probability of the event denoted by the whole expression in
read-once form can be computed in polynomial time (whereas the general problem
for arbitrary expressions is #P-complete). Known approaches to checking
read-once property seem to require putting these expressions in disjunctive
normal form. In this paper, we tell a better story for a large subclass of
boolean event expressions: those that are generated by conjunctive queries
without self-joins and on tuple-independent probabilistic databases. We first
show that given a tuple-independent representation and the provenance graph of
an SPJ query plan without self-joins, we can, without using the DNF of a result
event expression, efficiently compute its co-occurrence graph. From this, the
read-once form can already, if it exists, be computed efficiently using
existing techniques. Our second and key contribution is a complete, efficient,
and simple to implement algorithm for computing the read-once forms (whenever
they exist) directly, using a new concept, that of co-table graph, which can be
significantly smaller than the co-occurrence graph.Comment: Accepted in ICDT 201
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