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Winter 2001
Note: Events of interest to the Database Research Group are posted
to the uw.cs.database newsgroup and to subscribers of the dbgroup mailing
list. If you wish to subscribe to the dbgroup mailing list, send mail to
majordomo@db
with "subscribe dbgroup" in the message body. To unsubscribe, send "unsubscribe
dbgroup" to the same address.
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DB group meetings
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The DB group meets most Friday afternoons at 2pm, usually in DC1331. See
the list of current events for times and locations
of upcoming meetings. Each meeting lasts for an hour and features an informal
presentation by one of the members of the group. Everyone is welcome to
attend. These talks are intended to raise questions and to stimulate discussion
rather than being polished presentations of research results. Speakers
are determined using a rotating speaker list, which can be found on the
DB
group meeting page
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DB
seminar series
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The DB seminar series features visiting speakers. These seminars are more-or-less
monthly, and are usually scheduled on Monday mornings at 11am. See the
list
of current events for times and locations of upcoming seminars. The
full schedule can be found on the
DB
seminar series page.
Recent and Upcoming Events
DB
meeting: |
Friday, September 21st, 2:00 pm, DC3303
(the DB Lab) |
Speaker: |
Kickoff meeting - no speaker. |
Topic: |
Announcements and introductions. |
Snacks: |
Yes! Bring your own mug... |
DB
meeting: |
Friday, September 28th, 2:00 pm, DC1331 |
Speaker: |
Airi Salminen |
Topic: |
Modelling databases of multi-faceted XML documents |
Abstract: |
A well-defined database system is based on a well-defined data
model. The complexity of XML-related data repositories and the need to
integrate the management of structured documents with the management of
other types of data creates a special challenge for the underlying data
model. Different data models have been suggested for XML data, for example,
the XQuery 1.0 and XPath
2.0 Data Model. The models may be sufficient for developing capabilities
dealing with the hierarchic structure of elements. To be able to manage
XML documents with their multiple facets as a database, however, requires
a richer data model. In the talk I first briefly discuss requirements for
the data model. Then I explore the capabilities to use the production rules
of the XML 1.0 specification as a basis for the model. The model would
serve as a universal model from where views describing the different realities
represented by XML documents could be derived.
References:
A.Salminen and F.W.Tompa, Requirements
for XML Document Database Systems, ACM Symposium on Document Engineering,
Atlanta, Nov. 2001 (to appear).
A.Salminen and F.W.Tompa, Grammars++
for Modelling Information in Text, Information Systems, Vol. 24, No.
1 (1999), 1-24. |
Snacks: |
Huizhu Liu |
DB
meeting: |
Friday, October 5th, 2:00 pm,
DC1304 |
Speaker: |
Chiasen (Charles) Chung |
Topic: |
Topic-Oriented Collaborative Web Crawling |
Snacks: |
Ken Salem |
Note: |
this is an MMath thesis presentation |
DB
meeting: |
Friday, October 12th, 2:00 pm, DC1331 |
Speaker: |
Vlado Keselj |
Topic: |
Question-Answering Using Modular Stochastic HPSG Grammars |
Snacks: |
Charlies Chung |
Abstract: |
I will describe the architecture of a question answering system.
The key novel solutions implemented in the system are:
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a "light" HPSG formalism with a stochastic component
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grammar modules for different domains, and
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just-in-time sub-grammar extraction for faster NL processing.
Some encouraging preliminary evaluation results will be presented and analyzed. |
DB
meeting: |
Friday, October 19th, 2:00 pm,
DC1331 |
Speaker: |
Gord Cormack |
Topic: |
Web-Boosted Question Answering |
Snacks: |
Vlado Keselj |
Abstract: |
I will discuss our participation in the TREC 10 question answering
task. The objective of the task is to find short answers to factual
questions within a fixed corpus of news data. The performance of
our system is much improved when Web data are included with the corpus
data in initial phases of processing, and removed in a final filtering
step. |
DB
meeting: |
Friday, October 26th, 2:00 pm,
DC1331 |
Speaker: |
Heng Yu |
Topic: |
A DBMS Perspective on Update of Kernel Data in Linux |
Snacks: |
Gord Cormack |
Abstract: |
The information integration of legacy Embedded Control Program
(ECP) is of great significance in industry and has received good attention
in research. To provide a DBMS wrapper for ECP, it is necessary to carry
on reverse engineering based on ECP source code in order to find hidden
database features. Linux operating system is taken as a specimen of ECP
for analysis. The focus is on the system call fork() to explore abstraction
both from kernel data structures to database scheme and from control flow
in program to transaction model. The protection facilities in Linux is
surveyed and the protection pattern in the study case is analysed. The
traditional transaction model saga is used to model the transaction feature
in linux system call fork(). |
DB
meeting: |
Friday, November 2nd, 2:00 pm,
DC1331 |
Speaker: |
Kevin See |
Topic: |
With the increasing use of the XML technology, an efficient way to
store and query the XML data will be crucial. There are several ways to
manage the XML document. The simplest way is to store it as a file in the
operating system level. Another approach is to use existing database technology
(relational database and object-oriented database) as the backend using
some form of mapping. Yet another approach is to develop a new storage
technology designed specifically to store XML. In this presentation, we
will focus on two of the newest mapping proposals that employ a relational
database as a backend. The desiderata of an XML benchmark will be addressed
along with existing proposals of XML benchmark. |
Snacks: |
Heng Yu |
Note: |
this is an MMath essay presentation |
DB
meeting: |
Friday, November 9th, 2:00 pm,
DC1331 |
Speaker: |
Lei Chen |
Topic: |
In this talk, I will give a brief overview of MPEG-7. The following
topics will be addressed:
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Motivation and Objectives of MPEG-7
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MPEG-7 structure
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MPEG-7 data definition language
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MPEG-7 video and audio descriptors
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MPEG-7 multimedia description schemes
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Research issues regarding to MPEG-7
|
Snacks: |
Grant Weddell |
DB
meeting: |
Friday, November 23rd, 2:00 pm,
DC1331 |
Speaker: |
Anil Goel |
Topic: |
I'll discuss some published work on the problem of optimizing and executing
"TOP N" queries. |
Snacks: |
Lei Chen |
DB
meeting: |
Friday, November 23rd, 2:00 pm,
DC1331 |
Speaker: |
Ian Davis |
Topic: |
Integrating Xpath with SQL or, if you prefer, SQL with Xpath |
Snacks: |
Anil Goel |
Abstract: |
Xpath is a specification which allows fragments of text to be
recovered and operated upon. Xpath restricts the information recovered
according to a complex set of considerations which include structural requirements,
relationships between fragments of text, types of text, and textual content.
Xpath further allows texts to be restricted by sequences of boolean predicates
which may themselves employ knowledge of the texts being restricted in
deriving a true (include) or false (exclude) result.
The boolean predicates as provided in Xpath approximate a simplified
subset of the predicates available in SQL2. In this talk I will focus
on how Xpath can be extended to support a direct mapping of text into relations
usable by SQL2, and how the boolean predicates employed by Xpath can be
generalised to support arbitrary SQL2 predicates.
I will also focus on how the internal runtime optimisations necessary
to support indexing of text accessed by external SQL where clauses, can
be transformed into boolean predicates embedded within the Xpath expressions
returning these texts. |
DB
meeting: |
Friday, December 7th, 2:00 pm,
DC1331 |
Speaker: |
Hui Zhang |
Topic: |
Translating FLWR Expressions into Extended Relational Algebra |
Snacks: |
Ian Davis |
Abstract: |
As XML becomes more widespread as a standard representation
for data, XML-based query languages and their evaluations are increasingly
important. Certainly, there are many alternative ways to process XML queries.
In common with other researchers, we wish to capitalize on the extensive
work invested in relational database technology. In particular, we take
an algebraic approach to translate FLWR expressions of W3C's XQuery to
an extended relational algebra with support for the structured text datatype.
In this talk, I will present our approach and study several optimization
cases. |
This page is maintained by Frank
Tompa and Ken Salem.