Survey over Existing Query and Transformation Languages

A widely acknowledged obstacle for realizing the vision of the Semantic Web is the inability of many current Semantic Web approaches to cope with data available in such diverging representation formalisms as XML, RDF, or Topic Maps. A common query language is the first step to allow transparent access to data in any of these formats. To further the understanding of the requirements and approaches proposed for query languages in the conventional as well as the Semantic Web, this report surveys a large number of query languages for accessing XML, RDF, or Topic Maps. This is the first systematic survey to consider query languages from all these areas. From the detailed survey of these query languages, a common classification scheme is derived that is useful for understanding and differentiating languages within and among all three areas

Supporting Change-Aware Semantic Web Services

The Semantic Web is not only evolving into a provider of structured meaningful content and knowledge representation, but also into a provider of services. While most of these services support external users of the SW, we focus on a vital service within the SW – change management and adaptation. Change is a ubiquitous feature of the SW. In this paper, we propose a service architecture that embraces and utilises change to provide higher quality services. We introduce pilot implementations of two supporting services within this architecture

Textpresso for Neuroscience: Searching the Full Text of Thousands of Neuroscience Research Papers

Textpresso is a text-mining system for scientific literature. Its two major features are access to the full text of research papers and the development and use of categories of biological concepts as well as categories that describe or relate objects. A search engine enables the user to search for one or a combination of these categories and/or keywords within an entire literature. Here we describe Textpresso for Neuroscience, part of the core Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF). The Textpresso site currently consists of 67,500 full text papers and 131,300 abstracts. We show that using categories in literature can make a pure keyword query more refined and meaningful. We also show how semantic queries can be formulated with categories only. We explain the build and content of the database and describe the main features of the web pages and the advanced search options. We also give detailed illustrations of the web service developed to provide programmatic access to Textpresso. This web service is used by the NIF interface to access Textpresso. The standalone website of Textpresso for Neuroscience can be accessed at http://www.textpresso.org/neuroscience

No-But-Semantic-Match: Computing Semantically Matched XML Keyword Search Results

Users are rarely familiar with the content of a data source they are querying, and therefore cannot avoid using keywords that do not exist in the data source. Traditional systems may respond with an empty result, causing dissatisfaction, while the data source in effect holds semantically related content. In this paper we study this no-but-semantic-match problem on XML keyword search and propose a solution which enables us to present the top-k semantically related results to the user. Our solution involves two steps: (a) extracting semantically related candidate queries from the original query and (b) processing candidate queries and retrieving the top-k semantically related results. Candidate queries are generated by replacement of non-mapped keywords with candidate keywords obtained from an ontological knowledge base. Candidate results are scored using their cohesiveness and their similarity to the original query. Since the number of queries to process can be large, with each result having to be analyzed, we propose pruning techniques to retrieve the top-$k$ results efficiently. We develop two query processing algorithms based on our pruning techniques. Further, we exploit a property of the candidate queries to propose a technique for processing multiple queries in batch, which improves the performance substantially. Extensive experiments on two real datasets verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approaches.Comment: 24 pages, 21 figures, 6 tables, submitted to The VLDB Journal for possible publicatio

Technology Integration around the Geographic Information: A State of the Art

One of the elements that have popularized and facilitated the use of geographical information on a variety of computational applications has been the use of Web maps; this has opened new research challenges on different subjects, from locating places and people, the study of social behavior or the analyzing of the hidden structures of the terms used in a natural language query used for locating a place. However, the use of geographic information under technological features is not new, instead it has been part of a development and technological integration process. This paper presents a state of the art review about the application of geographic information under different approaches: its use on location based services, the collaborative user participation on it, its contextual-awareness, its use in the Semantic Web and the challenges of its use in natural languge queries. Finally, a prototype that integrates most of these areas is presented

Web and Semantic Web Query Languages

A number of techniques have been developed to facilitate powerful data retrieval on the Web and Semantic Web. Three categories of Web query languages can be distinguished, according to the format of the data they can retrieve: XML, RDF and Topic Maps. This article introduces the spectrum of languages falling into these categories and summarises their salient aspects. The languages are introduced using common sample data and query types. Key aspects of the query languages considered are stressed in a conclusion