Evaluation of a prototype interface for structured document retrieval

Document collections often display either internal structure, in the form of the logical arrangement of document components, or external structure, in the form of links between documents. Structured document retrieval systems aim to exploit this structural information to provide users with more effective access to structured documents. To do this, the associated interface must both represent this information explicitly and support users in their browsing behaviour. This paper describes the implementation and user-centred evaluation of a prototype interface, the RelevanceLinkBar interface. The results of the evaluation show that the RelevanceLinkBar interface supported users in their browsing behaviour, allowing them to find more relevant documents, and was strongly preferred over a standard results interface

The relationship between IR and multimedia databases

Modern extensible database systems support multimedia data through ADTs. However, because of the problems with multimedia query formulation, this support is not sufficient.\ud \ud Multimedia querying requires an iterative search process involving many different representations of the objects in the database. The support that is needed is very similar to the processes in information retrieval.\ud \ud Based on this observation, we develop the miRRor architecture for multimedia query processing. We design a layered framework based on information retrieval techniques, to provide a usable query interface to the multimedia database.\ud \ud First, we introduce a concept layer to enable reasoning over low-level concepts in the database.\ud \ud Second, we add an evidential reasoning layer as an intermediate between the user and the concept layer.\ud \ud Third, we add the functionality to process the users' relevance feedback.\ud \ud We then adapt the inference network model from text retrieval to an evidential reasoning model for multimedia query processing.\ud \ud We conclude with an outline for implementation of miRRor on top of the Monet extensible database system

The accessibility dimension for structured document retrieval

Structured document retrieval aims at retrieving the document components that best satisfy a query, instead of merely retrieving pre-defined document units. This paper reports on an investigation of a tf-idf-acc approach, where tf and idf are the classical term frequency and inverse document frequency, and acc, a new parameter called accessibility, that captures the structure of documents. The tf-idf-acc approach is defined using a probabilistic relational algebra. To investigate the retrieval quality and estimate the acc values, we developed a method that automatically constructs diverse test collections of structured documents from a standard test collection, with which experiments were carried out. The analysis of the experiments provides estimates of the acc values

A logic programming framework for modeling temporal objects

Published versio

RSQL - a query language for dynamic data types

Database Management Systems (DBMS) are used by software applications, to store, manipulate, and retrieve large sets of data. However, the requirements of current software systems pose various challenges to established DBMS. First, most software systems organize their data by means of objects rather than relations leading to increased maintenance, redundancy, and transformation overhead when persisting objects to relational databases. Second, complex objects are separated into several objects resulting in Object Schizophrenia and hard to persist Distributed State. Last but not least, current software systems have to cope with increased complexity and changes. These challenges have lead to a general paradigm shift in the development of software systems. Unfortunately, classical DBMS will become intractable, if they are not adapted to the new requirements imposed by these software systems. As a result, we propose an extension of DBMS with roles to represent complex objects within a relational database and support the exibility required by current software systems. To achieve this goal, we introduces RSQL, an extension to SQL with the concept of objects playing roles when interacting with other objects. Additionally, we present a formal model for the logical representation of roles in the extended DBMS