Towards Scalable Model Indexing

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is a software engineering discipline promoting models as first-class artefacts of the software lifecycle. It offers increased productivity, consistency, maintainability and reuse by using these models to generate other necessary products, such as program code or documentation. As such, persisting, accessing, manipulating, transforming and querying such models needs to be efficient, for maintaining the various benefits MDE can offer. Scalability is often identified to be a bottleneck for potential adapters of MDE, as large-scale models need to be handled seamlessly, without causing disproportionate losses in performance or limiting the ability of multiple stakeholders to work simultaneously on the same collection of large models. This work identifies the primary scalability concerns of MDE and tackles those related to the querying of large collections of models in collaborative modeling environments; it presents a novel approach whereby information contained in such models can be efficiently retrieved, orthogonally to the formats in which models are persisted. This approach, coined model indexing leverages the use of file-based version control systems for storing models, while allowing developers to efficiently query models without needing to retrieve them from remote locations or load them into memory beforehand. Empirical evidence gathered during the course of the research project is then detailed, which provides confidence that such novel tools and technologies can mitigate these specific scalability concerns; the results obtained are promising, offering large improvements in the execution time of certain classes of queries, which can be further optimized by use of caching and database indexing techniques. The architecture of the approach is also empirically validated, by virtue of integration with various state-of-the-art modeling and model management tools, and so is the correctness of the various algorithms used in this approach

Storage Solutions for Big Data Systems: A Qualitative Study and Comparison

Big data systems development is full of challenges in view of the variety of application areas and domains that this technology promises to serve. Typically, fundamental design decisions involved in big data systems design include choosing appropriate storage and computing infrastructures. In this age of heterogeneous systems that integrate different technologies for optimized solution to a specific real world problem, big data system are not an exception to any such rule. As far as the storage aspect of any big data system is concerned, the primary facet in this regard is a storage infrastructure and NoSQL seems to be the right technology that fulfills its requirements. However, every big data application has variable data characteristics and thus, the corresponding data fits into a different data model. This paper presents feature and use case analysis and comparison of the four main data models namely document oriented, key value, graph and wide column. Moreover, a feature analysis of 80 NoSQL solutions has been provided, elaborating on the criteria and points that a developer must consider while making a possible choice. Typically, big data storage needs to communicate with the execution engine and other processing and visualization technologies to create a comprehensive solution. This brings forth second facet of big data storage, big data file formats, into picture. The second half of the research paper compares the advantages, shortcomings and possible use cases of available big data file formats for Hadoop, which is the foundation for most big data computing technologies. Decentralized storage and blockchain are seen as the next generation of big data storage and its challenges and future prospects have also been discussed

AsterixDB: A Scalable, Open Source BDMS

AsterixDB is a new, full-function BDMS (Big Data Management System) with a feature set that distinguishes it from other platforms in today's open source Big Data ecosystem. Its features make it well-suited to applications like web data warehousing, social data storage and analysis, and other use cases related to Big Data. AsterixDB has a flexible NoSQL style data model; a query language that supports a wide range of queries; a scalable runtime; partitioned, LSM-based data storage and indexing (including B+-tree, R-tree, and text indexes); support for external as well as natively stored data; a rich set of built-in types; support for fuzzy, spatial, and temporal types and queries; a built-in notion of data feeds for ingestion of data; and transaction support akin to that of a NoSQL store. Development of AsterixDB began in 2009 and led to a mid-2013 initial open source release. This paper is the first complete description of the resulting open source AsterixDB system. Covered herein are the system's data model, its query language, and its software architecture. Also included are a summary of the current status of the project and a first glimpse into how AsterixDB performs when compared to alternative technologies, including a parallel relational DBMS, a popular NoSQL store, and a popular Hadoop-based SQL data analytics platform, for things that both technologies can do. Also included is a brief description of some initial trials that the system has undergone and the lessons learned (and plans laid) based on those early "customer" engagements

Distributed Processing of Generalized Graph-Pattern Queries in SPARQL 1.1

We propose an efficient and scalable architecture for processing generalized graph-pattern queries as they are specified by the current W3C recommendation of the SPARQL 1.1 "Query Language" component. Specifically, the class of queries we consider consists of sets of SPARQL triple patterns with labeled property paths. From a relational perspective, this class resolves to conjunctive queries of relational joins with additional graph-reachability predicates. For the scalable, i.e., distributed, processing of this kind of queries over very large RDF collections, we develop a suitable partitioning and indexing scheme, which allows us to shard the RDF triples over an entire cluster of compute nodes and to process an incoming SPARQL query over all of the relevant graph partitions (and thus compute nodes) in parallel. Unlike most prior works in this field, we specifically aim at the unified optimization and distributed processing of queries consisting of both relational joins and graph-reachability predicates. All communication among the compute nodes is established via a proprietary, asynchronous communication protocol based on the Message Passing Interface

Toward Entity-Aware Search

As the Web has evolved into a data-rich repository, with the standard "page view," current search engines are becoming increasingly inadequate for a wide range of query tasks. While we often search for various data "entities" (e.g., phone number, paper PDF, date), today's engines only take us indirectly to pages. In my Ph.D. study, we focus on a novel type of Web search that is aware of data entities inside pages, a significant departure from traditional document retrieval. We study the various essential aspects of supporting entity-aware Web search. To begin with, we tackle the core challenge of ranking entities, by distilling its underlying conceptual model Impression Model and developing a probabilistic ranking framework, EntityRank, that is able to seamlessly integrate both local and global information in ranking. We also report a prototype system built to show the initial promise of the proposal. Then, we aim at distilling and abstracting the essential computation requirements of entity search. From the dual views of reasoning--entity as input and entity as output, we propose a dual-inversion framework, with two indexing and partition schemes, towards efficient and scalable query processing. Further, to recognize more entity instances, we study the problem of entity synonym discovery through mining query log data. The results we obtained so far have shown clear promise of entity-aware search, in its usefulness, effectiveness, efficiency and scalability

The aceToolbox: low-level audiovisual feature extraction for retrieval and classification

In this paper we present an overview of a software platform that has been developed within the aceMedia project, termed the aceToolbox, that provides global and local lowlevel feature extraction from audio-visual content. The toolbox is based on the MPEG-7 eXperimental Model (XM), with extensions to provide descriptor extraction from arbitrarily shaped image segments, thereby supporting local descriptors reflecting real image content. We describe the architecture of the toolbox as well as providing an overview of the descriptors supported to date. We also briefly describe the segmentation algorithm provided. We then demonstrate the usefulness of the toolbox in the context of two different content processing scenarios: similarity-based retrieval in large collections and scene-level classification of still images