Project: InferXML – inference of semantic associations over collections of XML documents

Description

In contemporary query languages, the user is responsible for the specification of navigation among semantically related data. Because of the amount of data and their complex structural relationships, it is unrealistic to suppose that the user could know completely the content and structure of available information. Several query languages seek  to facilitate navigation in unknown structures of databases, e.g., a navigation path can contain unknown parts. A basic assumption in these languages is that the user knows how data are related to each other semantically – what their semantic associations are. Some may be explicit in the data structure, some implicit across documents.

So far only little attention has been paid to how unknown semantic associations among available data can be discovered. A semantic association between two objects can be constructed if a sequence of explicit relationships in a database can be found that connects these objects. This sequence may contain several other objects through which the original objects are connected indirectly. We have developed an expressive and declarative query language for discovering semantic associations. In addition to explicitly given objects, our query language is able to discover semantic associations among unknown objects some characteristics of which are only known. Further, it integrates the manipulation of semantic associations with the manipulation of documents which may contain information on objects in semantic associations. Because a semantic association may contain several relationships and objects, the results of queries are presented in natural language to facilitate their interpretation.

Duration

2005 - 2009

Researchers

Mr. Janne Jämsen (Dept. of Computer and Information Sciences) – supervised by Prof. Timo Niemi
Prof. Timo Niemi (Dept. of Computer and Information Sciences)
Prof. Kalervo Järvelin

Publications

1. Niemi, T. & Jämsen, J. (2007a). A Query Language for Discovering Semantic Associations: Part I: Introducing the Query Language. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58(11): 1559-1568.

2. Niemi, T. & Jämsen, J. (2007b). A Query Language for Discovering Semantic Associations: Part II: Applications and Query Evaluation. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58(1): 1686-1700. doi.wiley.com/10.1002/asi.20655 .
   
   
3. Janne Jämsen, Timo Niemi and Kalervo Järvelin, Using derived typesin discovering and analysing semantic associations. University of Tampere, Dept. of Computer Science, Report A-2006-2, September 2006.
   
   

Updated 11.3.2008 Responsibility for updating: KJ