Abstract Virtual worlds such as Second Life are closed environments that are purposely isolated from the real world and, in particular, from the data and information space provided by the World Wide Web. There is a rising need, however,... more
Abstract Virtual worlds such as Second Life are closed environments that are purposely isolated from the real world and, in particular, from the data and information space provided by the World Wide Web. There is a rising need, however, tocommunicate and exchange data between virtual environments and the outside world, both for commercial applications andfor private convenience.
In this paper we propose a query disambiguation mechanism for query context focalization in a meta-search environment. Our methods start from a set of documents retrieved executing a query over a search engine and applies clustering in... more
In this paper we propose a query disambiguation mechanism for query context focalization in a meta-search environment. Our methods start from a set of documents retrieved executing a query over a search engine and applies clustering in order to generate distinct homogeneous groups. Then, the following step is to compute for each cluster a disambiguated query that highlights its main contents. The disambiguated queries are suggestions for possible new focalized searches.
Abstract. The use of patterns in data management is not new: in data warehousing, data marts are simple conceptual schemas with exactly one core entity, describing facts, surrounded by multiple entities, describing data analysis... more
Abstract. The use of patterns in data management is not new: in data warehousing, data marts are simple conceptual schemas with exactly one core entity, describing facts, surrounded by multiple entities, describing data analysis dimensions; data marts support special analysis operations, such as roll up, drill down, and cube.
Abstract: The aim of an ongoing research project carried out by six European research and educational institutions is to establish a Virtual Institute for the Modelling of Industrial Manufacturing Systems (VIMIMS). The VIMIMS virtual... more
Abstract: The aim of an ongoing research project carried out by six European research and educational institutions is to establish a Virtual Institute for the Modelling of Industrial Manufacturing Systems (VIMIMS). The VIMIMS virtual institute has been designed to become an international platform for teaching and research in the field of analysis, design and performance evaluation of industrial manufacturing systems.
In this paper, we face the so called “ranked list problem” of Web searches, that occurs when users submit short requests to search engines. Generally, as a consequence of terms' ambiguity and polysemy, users engage long cycles of query... more
In this paper, we face the so called “ranked list problem” of Web searches, that occurs when users submit short requests to search engines. Generally, as a consequence of terms' ambiguity and polysemy, users engage long cycles of query reformulation in an attempt to capture relevant information in the top ranked results. The overall objective of the proposal is to support the user in optimizing Web searches, by reducing the need for long search iterations.
Abstract This paper proposes a novel language in order to explore the results retrieved by several internet search services and search engines that cluster retrieved documents. The goal of this work, rooted in the new context of Search... more
Abstract This paper proposes a novel language in order to explore the results retrieved by several internet search services and search engines that cluster retrieved documents. The goal of this work, rooted in the new context of Search Computing, is to offer users a tool to discover relevant hidden relationships between clustered documents.
Service-oriented architectures (SOA) provide the basis to (re) design business processes in order to develop flexible applications where available services are dynamically composed to satisfy business goals. The adoption of this type of... more
Service-oriented architectures (SOA) provide the basis to (re) design business processes in order to develop flexible applications where available services are dynamically composed to satisfy business goals. The adoption of this type of architecture enables the design of information systems that connect IEs to each other to run collaborative business processes. In fact, organizations can design service-based processes based either on simple internal applications or on external services.
Abstract This Chapter describes a visual framework; called XQBE; that covers the most important aspects of XML data management; spanning the visualization of XML documents; the formulation of queries; the representation and specification... more
Abstract This Chapter describes a visual framework; called XQBE; that covers the most important aspects of XML data management; spanning the visualization of XML documents; the formulation of queries; the representation and specification of document schemata; the definition of integrity constraints; the formulation of updates; and the expression of reactive behaviors in response to data modifications.
Abstract People shop online, compare online, book hotels and flights online. This happens because the data needed to complete these tasks are easily accessible and a lot of Web sites allows users to query the Web to obtain enough... more
Abstract People shop online, compare online, book hotels and flights online. This happens because the data needed to complete these tasks are easily accessible and a lot of Web sites allows users to query the Web to obtain enough information to be confident. The aim of this work is to propose a framework tailored to extend the internet revolution to public administration. This work is the first step towards an infrastructure allowing people to know in a very easy way the information they need.
Abstract. Web data extraction is an enabling technique in the search computing scenario. In this chapter, we first review the state of the art in wrapper technologies focusing on how wrapper generators can be used to create unified... more
Abstract. Web data extraction is an enabling technique in the search computing scenario. In this chapter, we first review the state of the art in wrapper technologies focusing on how wrapper generators can be used to create unified services that integrate data from Web Applications and Web services in various domains. Next, we describe the Lixto approach and we present the Lixto Suite as one example of Web Process Integration.
Methods In order to design our generalized data warehouse schema, we analyzed the types of data provided by several different of the most relevant biomolecular databanks publicly accessible, and abstracted a general global schema that can... more
Methods In order to design our generalized data warehouse schema, we analyzed the types of data provided by several different of the most relevant biomolecular databanks publicly accessible, and abstracted a general global schema that can incorporate the schema that the data to be integrated in the data warehouse have in their source databank.
Abstract XQuery, the standard query language for XML, is gaining popularity among users with a SQL background; indeed, formulating XQuery and SQL queries requires comparable skills. However, this nucleus of programmers is not vast, and... more
Abstract XQuery, the standard query language for XML, is gaining popularity among users with a SQL background; indeed, formulating XQuery and SQL queries requires comparable skills. However, this nucleus of programmers is not vast, and the availability of simpler XQuery “dialects” could be valuable for establishing its success. With this motivation in mind, we designed XQBE, a visual dialect of XQuery inspired by QBE (Query by Example).
Abstract XQBE (XQuery By Example) is a visual XML query language which, coherently with the hierarchical XML data model, uses tree-shaped structures to express queries and transformations over XML documents. These structures are annotated... more
Abstract XQBE (XQuery By Example) is a visual XML query language which, coherently with the hierarchical XML data model, uses tree-shaped structures to express queries and transformations over XML documents. These structures are annotated to express selection predicates; explicit bindings between the nodes of such structures visualize the input/output mappings.
Page 1. An Interaction Framework for Mobile Web Search Gloria Bordogna Alessandro Campi Giuseppe Psaila Stefania Ronchi . CNR-IDPA Politecnico di Milano Università di Bergamo . Via Pasubio 3 DEI Facoltà di Ingegneria . 24044 Dalmine (BG)... more
Page 1. An Interaction Framework for Mobile Web Search Gloria Bordogna Alessandro Campi Giuseppe Psaila Stefania Ronchi . CNR-IDPA Politecnico di Milano Università di Bergamo . Via Pasubio 3 DEI Facoltà di Ingegneria . 24044 Dalmine (BG) Piazza L. da Vinci 32 Viale Marconi 5 . Italy 20133 Milano 24044 Dalmine (BG) . gloria.bordogna@idpa.cnr.it Italy Italy . .
Abstract XQuery, the standard query language for XML, is increasingly popular among computer scientists with SQL background, since XQuery and SQL require comparable skills. However, these experts are limited in number, and the... more
Abstract XQuery, the standard query language for XML, is increasingly popular among computer scientists with SQL background, since XQuery and SQL require comparable skills. However, these experts are limited in number, and the availability of easier XQuery “dialects” could be extremely valuable. With this motivation in mind, we designed XQBE, a visual dialect of XQuery inspired by the QBE language (Query by Example).
The use of patterns in data management is not new: in data warehousing, data marts are simple conceptual schemas with exactly one core entity, describing facts, surrounded by multiple entities, describing data analysis dimensions; data... more
The use of patterns in data management is not new: in data warehousing, data marts are simple conceptual schemas with exactly one core entity, describing facts, surrounded by multiple entities, describing data analysis dimensions; data marts support special analysis operations, such as roll up, drill down, and cube.
It is a common understanding that the Web changes everything, and this applies to an increasing number of computer applications. In the last years, we also understood that XML is the means for this change to take effect, as XML has... more
It is a common understanding that the Web changes everything, and this applies to an increasing number of computer applications. In the last years, we also understood that XML is the means for this change to take effect, as XML has progressively become the basis on which Web applications are built. This corollary was the claim of [9], published four years ago, in which XML was pointed out as a prominent and promising research direction for the database community.
Abstract The recent success of XML as a standard to represent semi-structured data, and the increasing amount of available XML data pose new challenges to the data mining community. In this paper we present the XMINE operator, a tool... more
Abstract The recent success of XML as a standard to represent semi-structured data, and the increasing amount of available XML data pose new challenges to the data mining community. In this paper we present the XMINE operator, a tool developed to extract XML association rules for XML documents. The operator, based on XPath and inspired by the syntax of XQuery, allows us to express complex mining tasks, compactly and intuitively.
Abstract This paper describes a new interaction paradigm well suited to perform web searches though a mobile device. The prototypal system that implements this novel interaction framework is named Matrioshka, that is a multi-modal system.... more
Abstract This paper describes a new interaction paradigm well suited to perform web searches though a mobile device. The prototypal system that implements this novel interaction framework is named Matrioshka, that is a multi-modal system. In this paper we focus on the interaction framework and will introduce briefly an overview of the mobile version of Matrioshka. This framework is based on cluster manipulation operations.
The Semantic Resource Framework (SRF) is a multi-level description of the data sources for search computing applications. It responds to the need of having a structured representation of search services, amenable to service exploration,... more
The Semantic Resource Framework (SRF) is a multi-level description of the data sources for search computing applications. It responds to the need of having a structured representation of search services, amenable to service exploration, selection, and invocation. The SRF aims at extending the Service Mart model used so far in search computing to overcome some of its limitations.
A method and a computer program product for identifying the domains, selecting for each domain one domain-specific search engine and data source to be involved, generating the domain-specific subqueries for each selected search engine,... more
A method and a computer program product for identifying the domains, selecting for each domain one domain-specific search engine and data source to be involved, generating the domain-specific subqueries for each selected search engine, defining a strategy for sending requests to each search engine and data source, and receiving, merging and ranking results.
Abstract. The vision of dataspaces is to provide various of the benefits of classical data integration, but with reduced up-front costs, combined with opportunities for incremental refinement, enabling a “pay as you go” approach. As such,... more
Abstract. The vision of dataspaces is to provide various of the benefits of classical data integration, but with reduced up-front costs, combined with opportunities for incremental refinement, enabling a “pay as you go” approach. As such, dataspaces join a long stream of research activities that aim to build tools that simplify integrated access to distributed data.
Abstract Search computing focuses on building answers to complex search queries (for example," Where can I attend an interesting conference in my field near a sunny beach?") by interacting with a constellation of cooperating search... more
Abstract Search computing focuses on building answers to complex search queries (for example," Where can I attend an interesting conference in my field near a sunny beach?") by interacting with a constellation of cooperating search services, and using result ranking and joining as the dominant factors for service composition. The service computing paradigm has so far been neutral to the specific features of search applications and services.
L'esigenza di una rappresentazione efficace per tali documenti, unitamente all'esigenza di flessibilità di utenti e applicazioni che spesso devono integrare dati provenienti da sorgenti eterogenee, ha favorito la diffusione di XML,... more
L'esigenza di una rappresentazione efficace per tali documenti, unitamente all'esigenza di flessibilità di utenti e applicazioni che spesso devono integrare dati provenienti da sorgenti eterogenee, ha favorito la diffusione di XML, rapidamente adottato come formato standard per la codifica di informazioni semistrutturate.
Abstract With the worldwide adoption of the Internet as a ubiquitous platform for exchanging information, new opportunities are available for sharing educational experiences and material. Thousands of institutes worldwide offer access to... more
Abstract With the worldwide adoption of the Internet as a ubiquitous platform for exchanging information, new opportunities are available for sharing educational experiences and material. Thousands of institutes worldwide offer access to courses, lessons, seminars, and exercises, typically stored in repositories and offered to users under a variety of formats. Due to their educational nature, these contents are often referred to as Learning Objects.
Abstract Besides being adopted as the new interchange format for the Internet, XML is finding increasing acceptance as a native data repository language. In order to make XML repositories fully equipped with data management capabilities,... more
Abstract Besides being adopted as the new interchange format for the Internet, XML is finding increasing acceptance as a native data repository language. In order to make XML repositories fully equipped with data management capabilities, suitable query and update languages are being developed. However, once the user is allowed to perform updates, it is perceivably necessary to guarantee the correctness of his/her updates, especially if document validity or semantic constraints are violated.
Abstract As the use of XML is rapidly growing, a growing number of users without programming skills will need to query XML data. Although designed to be easily understood by humans, XQuery, the XML standard query language, has the typical... more
Abstract As the use of XML is rapidly growing, a growing number of users without programming skills will need to query XML data. Although designed to be easily understood by humans, XQuery, the XML standard query language, has the typical syntax of programming languages, which most users dislike. In this paper we describe a graphical language (XQBE) inspired by" Query By Example"(QBE), a popular relational query language used by MS Access.
ABSTRACT Querying XML data is a well-explored topic thanks to powerful query languages such as XPath and XQuery. Both were designed to support the evaluation of binary predicates, which can be proven to be a limited approach to effective... more
ABSTRACT Querying XML data is a well-explored topic thanks to powerful query languages such as XPath and XQuery. Both were designed to support the evaluation of binary predicates, which can be proven to be a limited approach to effective querying of XML data. In this paper, a fuzzy extension of the XPath query language is proposed. Its goal is to achieve more flexible querying through vague queries, which can be expressed exploiting fuzzy predicates and fuzzy connectives.
Abstract Research in data management at Politecnico di Milano has a long and solid tradition; forefront books on distributed databases, conceptual database design, logical databases, and active databases contributed to shape the... more
Abstract Research in data management at Politecnico di Milano has a long and solid tradition; forefront books on distributed databases, conceptual database design, logical databases, and active databases contributed to shape the foundations of this discipline in the last two decades. Historically, our work has addressed both all aspects of innovation in the technology of modern data management systems and the consequent support of design methods and tools.
ABSTRACT XML is becoming widespread as data interoperability standard in many application domains. An increasing number of researchers and professionals, who are not computer scientists (although they may have a strong technical... more
ABSTRACT XML is becoming widespread as data interoperability standard in many application domains. An increasing number of researchers and professionals, who are not computer scientists (although they may have a strong technical background), needs to query and transform XML data during their working activities. Such tasks typically require simple queries and partial awareness of the XML data model, in the context of a given, domain-specific XML-based protocol.
Abstract. The growing importance of XML calls for easier access to data management technologies, in order to provide domain experts who are inexperienced in database technologies with the possibility to directly query and transform domain... more
Abstract. The growing importance of XML calls for easier access to data management technologies, in order to provide domain experts who are inexperienced in database technologies with the possibility to directly query and transform domain specific data. Intuitiveness and simplicity are gained with the use of a graphical representation. The former is obtained by depicting the hierarchical XML data model as tree structures; the latter consists in considering only elements, attributes, and un-typed textual data.
Abstract XQuery, the standard query language for XML, is increasingly popular among computer scientists with a SQL background, since queries in XQuery and SQL require comparable skills to be formulated. However, the number of these... more
Abstract XQuery, the standard query language for XML, is increasingly popular among computer scientists with a SQL background, since queries in XQuery and SQL require comparable skills to be formulated. However, the number of these experts is limited, and the availability of easier XQuery" dialects" could be extremely valuable. With this motivation in mind, we designed XQBE, a dialect of XQuery inspired by the QBE language (query by example).
Abstract The need of formal verification is a problem that involves all the fields in which sensible data are managed. In this context the verification of data streams became a fundamental task. The purpose of this paper is to present a... more
Abstract The need of formal verification is a problem that involves all the fields in which sensible data are managed. In this context the verification of data streams became a fundamental task. The purpose of this paper is to present a framework, based on the model checker SPIN, for the verification of data streams. The proposed method uses a linear temporal logic, called TRIO, to describe data constraints and properties.
Abstract XQBE (XQuery By Example,[1]), a visual dialect of XQuery, uses hierarchical structures to express transformations between XML documents. XSLT, the standard transformation language for XML, is increasingly popular among... more
Abstract XQBE (XQuery By Example,[1]), a visual dialect of XQuery, uses hierarchical structures to express transformations between XML documents. XSLT, the standard transformation language for XML, is increasingly popular among programmers and Web developers for separating the application and presentation layers of Web applications.
Search Computing defines a new class of applications, which enable end users to perform exploratory search processes over multi-domain data sources available on the Web. These applications exploit suitable models, supported by a... more
Search Computing defines a new class of applications, which enable end users to perform exploratory search processes over multi-domain data sources available on the Web. These applications exploit suitable models, supported by a framework, that make it possible for expert users to configure the data sources to be searched and the interfaces for query submission and result visualization, by using for such source and interface configurations mash-up tools which do not require programming.
Abstract The spreading of XML data in many contexts of modern computing infrastructures and systems causes a pressing need for adequate XML querying capabilities; to address this need, the W3C is proposing XQuery as the standard query... more
Abstract The spreading of XML data in many contexts of modern computing infrastructures and systems causes a pressing need for adequate XML querying capabilities; to address this need, the W3C is proposing XQuery as the standard query language for XML, with a language paradigm and a syntactic flavor comparable to the SQL relational language. XQuery is designed for meeting the requirements of skilled database programmers; its inherent complexity makes the new language unsuited to unskilled users.
This paper addresses our experience in using and developing the VEG (Visual Event Grammars) toolkit for the formal specification, verification, design and implementation of graphical user interfaces. In fact, VEG follows the traditional... more
This paper addresses our experience in using and developing the VEG (Visual Event Grammars) toolkit for the formal specification, verification, design and implementation of graphical user interfaces. In fact, VEG follows the traditional Seeheim's model, decomposing a GUI in three parts. The Presentation Part takes into account how the different components of the GUI are depicted and laid out (eg, colors, borders, sizes and locations); in VEG this is delegated to an external presentation design toolkit.
Abstract Data mining algorithms are designed to extract interesting information from large amounts of data. They usually assume that source data are in relational (tabular) from. However, the recent success of XML as a standard to... more
Abstract Data mining algorithms are designed to extract interesting information from large amounts of data. They usually assume that source data are in relational (tabular) from. However, the recent success of XML as a standard to represent semi-structured data and the increasing amount of data available in XML pose new challenges to the data mining community. In this paper we introduce association rules for XML data.
Abstract We propose a novel conception language for exploring the results retrieved by several internet search services (like search engines) that cluster retrieved documents. The goal is to offer users a tool to discover relevant hidden... more
Abstract We propose a novel conception language for exploring the results retrieved by several internet search services (like search engines) that cluster retrieved documents. The goal is to offer users a tool to discover relevant hidden relationships between clustered documents.
XQuery is increasingly popular among computer scientists with a SQL background, since queries in XQuery and SQL require comparable skills to be formulated. However, the number of these experts is limited, and the availability of easier... more
XQuery is increasingly popular among computer scientists with a SQL background, since queries in XQuery and SQL require comparable skills to be formulated. However, the number of these experts is limited, and the availability of easier XQuery “dialects” could be extremely valuable. Something similar happened with QBE, initially proposed as an alternative to SQL, that has then become popular as the user-friendly query language supported by MS Access.
ABSTRACT Answering multi-domain queries requires the combination of knowledge from various domains. Such queries are inadequately answered by general-purpose search engines, because domainspecific systems typically exhibit sophisticated... more
ABSTRACT Answering multi-domain queries requires the combination of knowledge from various domains. Such queries are inadequately answered by general-purpose search engines, because domainspecific systems typically exhibit sophisticated knowledge about their own fields of expertise.