ICEIS 2008 Abstracts


Area 1 - Databases and Information Systems Integration

Full Papers
Paper Nr: 90
Title:

EMBEDDING XPATH QUERIES INTO SPARQL QUERIES

Authors:

Matthias Droop, Markus Flarer, Jinghua Groppe, Sven Groppe, Volker Linnemann, Jakob Pinggera, Florian Santner, Michael Schier, Felix Schöpf, Hannes Staffler and Stefan Zugal

Abstract: While XPath is an established query language developed by the W3C for XML, SPARQL is a new query language developed by the W3C for RDF data. Comparisons between the data models of XML and RDF and between the query languages XPath and SPARQL are missing. Since XML and XPath are earlier recommendations of the W3C than RDF and SPARQL, currently more XML data and XPath queries are used in applications. However, recently available SPARQL query evaluators do not deal with XML data and XPath queries. We have developed a prototype for translating XML data into RDF data and embedding XPath queries into SPARQL queries for the following two reasons: 1) We want to compare the XPath and XQuery data model with the RDF data model and the XPath query language with the SPARQL query language in order to show similarities and differences. 2) We want to enable SPARQL query evaluators to deal with XML data and XPath queries in order to support XPath processing and SPARQL processing in parallel. We have developed a prototype for the source-to-source translations from XML data into RDF data and from XPath queries into SPARQL queries. We have run experiments to measure the execution times of the translations, of XPath queries and of their translated SPARQL queries.
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Paper Nr: 247
Title:

ODDI - A Framework for Semi-automatic Data Integration

Authors:

Paolo Ceravolo, Ernesto Damiani, Marcello Leida, Zhan Cui and Alex Gusmini

Abstract: Recent works on Business Intelligence do highlight the need of on-time, trustable and sound data access systems. Moreover the application of these systems in a flexible and dynamic environment requires for an approach based on automatic procedures that can provide reliable results. A crucial factor for any automatic data integration system is the matching process. Different categories of matching operators carry different semantics. For this reason combining them in a single algorithm is a non trivial process that have to take into account a variety of options. This paper proposes a solution based on a categorization of matching operators that allow to group similar attributes on a semantic rich form. This way we define all the information need in order to create a mapping. Then Mapping Generation is activated only on those set of elements that can be queried without violating any integrity constraints on data.
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Paper Nr: 299
Title:

AN INTEGRATED MODEL FOR MANAGERIAL AND PRODUCTIVE ACTIVITIES IN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

Authors:

Daniel A. Callegari, Maurício Covolan Rosito, Marcelo Blois Ribeiro and Ricardo M. Bastos

Abstract: Software organizations are constantly looking for better solutions when designing and using well-defined software processes for the development of their products and services. However, many software development processes lack for more support on project management issues. This work proposes a model that integrates the concepts of PMBOK and RUP, helping process integration and assisting managers in the decision making process during project planning. We present the model and the results from a qualitative exploratory evaluation of a tool that implements the proposed model, conducted with project managers from nine companies.
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Paper Nr: 428
Title:

INTEROPERABILITY IN THE PETROLEUM INDUSTRY

Authors:

Jon A. Gulla

Abstract: The petroleum industry is a technically challenging business with highly specialized companies and complex operational structures. Several terminological standards have been introduced over the last few years, though they address particular disciplines and cannot help people collaborate efficiently across disciplines and organizational borders. This paper discusses the results from the industrally driven Integrated Information Platform project, which has developed and formalized an extensive OWL ontology for the Norwegian petroleum business. The ontology is now used in production reports, and the ontology is considered vital to semantic interoperability and the concept of integrated operations on the Norwegian continental shelf.
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Paper Nr: 544
Title:

TOWARDS A SEMIOTIC QUALITY FRAMEWORK OF SOFTWARE MEASURES

Authors:

Erki Eessaar

Abstract: Each software entity should have as high quality as possible in the context of limited resources. A software quality measure is a kind of software entity. Existing studies about the evaluation of software measures do not pay enough attention to the quality of specifications of measures. Semiotics has been used as a basis in order to evaluate the quality of different types of software entities. In this paper, we propose a multidimensional, semiotic quality framework of software quality measures. We apply this framework in order to evaluate the syntactic and semantic quality of two sets of database design measures. The evaluation shows that these measures have some quality problems.
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Paper Nr: 659
Title:

ADAPTATIVE MATCHING OF DATABASE WEB SERVICES EXPORT SCHEMAS

Authors:

Daniela F. Brauner, Alexandre Gazola, Marco A. Casanova and Karin Koogan Breitman

Abstract: This paper proposes an approach and a mediator architecture for adaptively matching export schemas of database Web services. Differently from traditional mediator approaches, the mediated schema is constructed from the mappings adaptively elicited from user query responses. That is, query results are post-processed to identify reliable mappings and to build the mediated schema on the fly. The approach is illustrated with two case studies from rather different application domains.
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Paper Nr: 678
Title:

SIZE AND EFFORT-BASED COMPUTATIONAL MODELS FOR SOFTWARE COST PREDICTION

Authors:

Efi Papatheocharous and Andreas Andreou

Abstract: Reliable and accurate software cost estimations have always been a challenge especially for people involved in project resource management. The challenge is amplified due to the high level of complexity and uniqueness of the software process. The majority of estimation methods proposed fail to produce successful cost forecasting and neither resolve to explicit, measurable and concise set of factors affecting productivity. Throughout the software cost estimation literature software size is usually proposed as one of the most important attributes affecting effort and is used to build cost models. This paper aspires to provide size and effort-based estimations for the required software effort of new projects based on data obtained from past completed projects. The modelling approach utilises Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) with a random sliding window input and output method using holdout samples and moreover, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) undertakes to evolve the inputs and internal hidden architectures and to reduce the Mean Relative Error (MRE). The obtained optimal ANN topologies and input and output methods for each dataset are presented, discussed and compared with a classic MLR model.
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Paper Nr: 709
Title:

A MAPPING-DRIVEN APPROACH FOR SQL/XML VIEW MAINTENANCE

Authors:

Vânia P. Vidal, Fernando Cordeiro de Lemos, Valdiana S. Araújo and Marco A. Casanova

Abstract: In this work we study the problem of how to incrementally maintain materialized XML views of relational data, based on the semantic mappings that model the relationship between the source and view schemas. The semantic mappings are specified by a set of correspondence assertions, which are simple to understand. The paper focuses on an algorithm to incrementally maintain materialized XML views of relational data.
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Paper Nr: 754
Title:

LANGUAGE EXTENSIONS FOR THE AUTOMATION OF DATABASE SCHEMA EVOLUTION

Authors:

George Papastefanatos, Panos Vassiliadis, Alkis Simitsis, Konstantinos Aggistalis, Fotini Pechlivani and Yannis Vassiliou

Abstract: The administrators and designers of modern Information Systems face the problem of maintaining their systems in the presence of frequently occurring changes in any counterpart of it. In other words, when a change occurs in any point of the system –e.g., source, schema, view, software construct– they should propagate the change in all the involved parts of the system. Hence, it is imperative that the whole process should be done correctly, i.e., the change should be propagated to all the appropriate points of the system, with a limited overhead imposed on both the system and the humans, who design and maintain it. In this paper, we are dealing with the problem of evolution in the context of databases. First, we present a coherent, graph-based framework for capturing the effect of potential changes in the database software of an Information System. Next, we describe a generic annotation policy for database evolution and we propose a feasible and powerful extension to the SQL language specifically tailored for the management of evolution. Finally, we demonstrate the efficiency and feasibility of our approach through a case study based on a real-world situation occurred in the Greek public sector.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 108
Title:

IMPLEMENTATION OF ALGEBRA FOR QUERYING WEB DATA SOURCES

Authors:

Iztok Savnik

Abstract: The paper presents the implementation of query execution system Qios. It serves as a lightware system for the manipulation of XML data. Qios employs the relational technology for query processing. The main aim in the implementation is to provide a querying system that is easy to use and does not require any additional knowledge about the internal representation of data. The system provides robust and simple solutions for many design problems. We aimed to simplify the internal structures of query processors rooted in the de- sign of relational and object-relational query processors. We propose efficient internal data structures for the representation of queries during all phases of query execution. The query optimization is based on dynamic programming and uses beam search to reduce the time complexity. The data structure for storing queries pr