Exact and approximate flexible aggregate similarity search

Aggregate similarity search, also known as aggregate nearest-neighbor (Ann) query, finds many useful applications in spatial and multimedia databases. Given a group Q of M query objects, it retrieves from a database the objects most similar to Q, where the similarity is an aggregation (e.g., \({{\mathrm{sum}}}\), \(\max \)) of the distances between each retrieved object p and all the objects in Q. In this paper, we propose an added flexibility to the query definition, where the similarity is an aggregation over the distances between p and any subset of \(\phi M\) objects in Q for some support \(0< \phi \le 1\). We call this new definition flexible aggregate similarity search and accordingly refer to a query as a flexible aggregate nearest-neighbor ( Fann ) query. We present algorithms for answering Fann queries exactly and approximately. Our approximation algorithms are especially appealing, which are simple, highly efficient, and work well in both low and high dimensions. They also return near-optimal answers with guaranteed constant-factor approximations in any dimensions. Extensive experiments on large real and synthetic datasets from 2 to 74 dimensions have demonstrated their superior efficiency and high quality.     

Object-stack: An object-oriented approach for top-k keyword querying over fuzzy XML

Keyword search is the most popular technique of searching information from XML (eXtensible markup language) document. It enables users to easily access XML data without learning the structure query language or studying the complex data schemas. Existing traditional keyword query methods are mainly based on LCA (lowest common ancestor) semantics, in which the returned results match all keywords at the granularity of elements. In many practical applications, information is often uncertain and vague. As a result, how to identify useful information from fuzzy data is becoming an important research topic. In this paper, we focus on the issue of keyword querying on fuzzy XML data at the granularity of objects. By introducing the concept of “object tree”, we propose the query semantics for keyword query at object-level. We find the minimum whole matching result object trees which contain all keywords and the partial matching result object trees which contain partial keywords, and return the root nodes of these result object trees as query results. For effectively and accurately identifying the top-K answers with the highest scores, we propose a score mechanism with the consideration of tf*idf document relevance, users’ preference and possibilities of results. We propose a stack-based algorithm named object-stack to obtain the top-K answers with the highest scores. Experimental results show that the object-stack algorithm outperforms the traditional XML keyword query algorithms significantly, and it can get high quality of query results with high search efficiency on the fuzzy XML document.     

Keyword query with structure: towards semantic scoring of XML search results

Keyword search is an effective paradigm for information discovery and has been introduced recently to query XML documents. Scoring of XML search results is an important issue in XML keyword search. Traditional “bag-of-words” model cannot differentiate the roles of keywords as well as the relationship between keywords, thus is not proper for XML keyword queries. In this paper, we present a new scoring method based on a novel query model, called keyword query with structure (QWS), which is specially designed for XML keyword query. The method is based on a totally new view taken by the QWS model on a keyword query that, a keyword query is a composition of several query units, each representing a query condition. We believe that this method captures the semantic relevance of the search results. The paper first introduces an algorithm reformulating a keyword query to a QWS. Then, a scoring method is presented which measures the relevance of search results according to how many and how well the query conditions are matched. The scoring method is also extended to clusters of search results. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of our methods.     

Reverse Furthest Neighbors Query in Road Networks

Given a road network G = (V,E), where V (E) denotes the set of vertices(edges) in G, a set of points of interest P and a query point q residing in G, the reverse furthest neighbors (Rfn _R ) query in road networks fetches a set of points p ∈ P that take q as their furthest neighbor compared with all points in P ∪ {q}. This is the monochromatic Rfn _R (Mrfn _R ) query. Another interesting version of Rfn _R query is the bichromatic reverse furthest neighbor (Brfn _R ) query. Given two sets of points P and Q, and a query point q ∈ Q, a Brfn _R query fetches a set of points p ∈ P that take q as their furthest neighbor compared with all points in Q. This paper presents efficient algorithms for both Mrfn _R and Brfn _R queries, which utilize landmarks and partitioning-based techniques. Experiments on real datasets confirm the efficiency and scalability of proposed algorithms.     

Scalable and efficient processing of top-<Emphasis Type="Italic">k</Emphasis> multiple-type integrated queries

In this paper, we define a new class of queries, the top-k multiple-type integrated query (simply, top-k MULTI query). It deals with multiple data types and finds the information in the order of relevance between the query and the object. Various data types such as spatial, textual, and relational data types can be used for the top-k MULTI query. The top-k MULTI query distinguishes itself from the traditional top-k query in that the component scores to calculate final scores are determined dependent of the query. Hence, each component score is calculated only when the query is given for each data type rather than being calculated apriori as in the top-k query. As a representative instance, the traditional top-k spatial keyword query is an instance of the top-k MULTI query. It deals with the spatial data type and text data type and finds the information based on spatial proximity and textual relevance between the query and the object, which is determined only when the query is given. In this paper, we first define the top-k MULTI query formally and define a new specific instance for the top-k MULTI query, the top-k spatial-keyword-relational(SKR) query, by integrating the relational data type into the traditional top-k spatial keyword query. Then, we investigate the processing approaches for the top-k MULTI query. We discuss the scalability of those approaches as new data types are integrated. We also devise the processing methods for the top-k SKR query. Finally, through extensive experiments on the top-k SKR query using real and synthetic data sets, we compare efficiency of the methods in terms of the query performance and storage.     

An effective suggestion method for keyword search of databases

This paper solves the problem of providing high-quality suggestions for user keyword queries over databases. With the assumption that the returned suggestions are independent, existing query suggestion methods over databases score candidate suggestions individually and return the top-k best of them. However, the top-k suggestions have high redundancy with respect to the topics. To provide informative suggestions, the returned k suggestions are expected to be diverse, i.e., maximizing the relevance to the user query and the diversity with respect to topics that the user might be interested in simultaneously. In this paper, an objective function considering both factors is defined for evaluating a suggestion set. We show that maximizing the objective function is a submodular function maximization problem subject to n matroid constraints, which is an NP-hard problem. An greedy approximate algorithm with an approximation ratio O(\(\frac {1}{1+n}\)) is also proposed. Experimental results show that our suggestion outperforms other methods on providing relevant and diverse suggestions.     

Know your customer: computing <Emphasis Type="Italic">k</Emphasis>-most promising products for targeted marketing

The advancement of World Wide Web has revolutionized the way the manufacturers can do business. The manufacturers can collect customer preferences for products and product features from their sales and other product-related Web sites to enter and sustain in the global market. For example, the manufactures can make intelligent use of these customer preference data to decide on which products should be selected for targeted marketing. However, the selected products must attract as many customers as possible to increase the possibility of selling more than their respective competitors. This paper addresses this kind of product selection problem. That is, given a database of existing products P from the competitors, a set of company’s own products Q, a dataset C of customer preferences and a positive integer k, we want to find k-most promising products (k-MPP) from Q with maximum expected number of total customers for targeted marketing. We model k-MPP query and propose an algorithmic framework for processing such query and its variants. Our framework utilizes grid-based data partitioning scheme and parallel computing techniques to realize k-MPP query. The effectiveness and efficiency of the framework are demonstrated by conducting extensive experiments with real and synthetic datasets.     

Answering subgraph queries over massive disk resident graphs

Due to its wide applications, subgraph query has attracted lots of attentions in database community. In this paper, we focus on subgraph query over a single large graph G, i.e., finding all embeddings of query Q in G. Different from existing feature-based approaches, we map all edges into a two-dimensional space R ² and propose a bitmap structure to index R ². At run time, we find a set of adjacent edge pairs (AEP) or star-style patterns (SSP) to cover Q. We develop edge join (EJ) algorithms to address both AEP and SSP subqueries. Based on the bitmap index, our method can optimize I/O and CPU cost. More importantly, our index has the linear space complexity instead of exponential complexity in feature-based approaches, which indicates that our index can scale well with respect to large data size. Furthermore, our index has light maintenance overhead, which has not been considered in most of existing work. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly outperforms existing ones in both online and offline processing with respect to query response time, index building time, index size and index maintenance overhead.     

Continuous visible nearest neighbor query processing in spatial databases

In this paper, we identify and solve a new type of spatial queries, called continuous visible nearest neighbor (CVNN) search. Given a data set P, an obstacle set O, and a query line segment q in a two-dimensional space, a CVNN query returns a set of \({\langle p, R\rangle}\) tuples such that \({p \in P}\) is the nearest neighbor to every point r along the interval \({R \subseteq q}\) as well as p is visible to r. Note that p may be NULL, meaning that all points in P are invisible to all points in R due to the obstruction of some obstacles in O. In contrast to existing continuous nearest neighbor query, CVNN retrieval considers the impact of obstacles on visibility between objects, which is ignored by most of spatial queries. We formulate the problem, analyze its unique characteristics, and develop efficient algorithms for exact CVNN query processing. Our methods (1) utilize conventional data-partitioning indices (e.g., R-trees) on both P and O, (2) tackle the CVNN search by performing a single query for the entire query line segment, and (3) only access the data points and obstacles relevant to the final query result by employing a suite of effective pruning heuristics. In addition, several interesting variations of CVNN queries have been introduced, and they can be supported by our techniques, which further demonstrates the flexibility of the proposed algorithms. A comprehensive experimental evaluation using both real and synthetic data sets has been conducted to verify the effectiveness of our proposed pruning heuristics and the performance of our proposed algorithms.     

Top-<Emphasis Type="Italic">k</Emphasis> coupled keyword recommendation for relational keyword queries

Providing top-k typical relevant keyword queries would benefit the users who cannot formulate appropriate queries to express their imprecise query intentions. By extracting the semantic relationships both between keywords and keyword queries, this paper proposes a new keyword query suggestion approach which can provide typical and semantically related queries to the given query. Firstly, a keyword coupling relationship measure, which considers both intra- and inter-couplings between each pair of keywords, is proposed. Then, the semantic similarity of different keyword queries can be measured by using a semantic matrix, in which the coupling relationships between keywords in queries are reserved. Based on the query semantic similarities, we next propose an approximation algorithm to find the most typical queries from query history by using the probability density estimation method. Lastly, a threshold-based top-k query selection method is proposed to expeditiously evaluate the top-k typical relevant queries. We demonstrate that our keyword coupling relationship and query semantic similarity measures can capture the coupling relationships between keywords and semantic similarities between keyword queries accurately. The efficiency of query typicality analysis and top-k query selection algorithm is also demonstrated.     

Processing SPARQL queries over distributed RDF graphs

We propose techniques for processing SPARQL queries over a large RDF graph in a distributed environment. We adopt a “partial evaluation and assembly” framework. Answering a SPARQL query Q is equivalent to finding subgraph matches of the query graph Q over RDF graph G. Based on properties of subgraph matching over a distributed graph, we introduce local partial match as partial answers in each fragment of RDF graph G. For assembly, we propose two methods: centralized and distributed assembly. We analyze our algorithms from both theoretically and experimentally. Extensive experiments over both real and benchmark RDF repositories of billions of triples confirm that our method is superior to the state-of-the-art methods in both the system’s performance and scalability.     

Aggregate location recommendation in dynamic transportation networks

Travel planning and location recommendation are increasingly important in recent years. In this light, we propose and study a novel aggregate location recommendation query (ALRQ) of discovering aggregate locations for multiple travelers and planning the corresponding travel routes in dynamic transportation networks. Assuming the scenario that multiple travelers target the same destination, given a set of travelers’ locations Q, a set of potential aggregate location O, and a departure time t, the ALRQ finds an aggregate location o ∈ O that has the minimum global travel time \({\sum }_{q \in Q} T(q,o,t)\), where T(q,o,t) is the travel time between o and q with departure time t. The ALRQ problem is challenging due to three reasons: (1) how to model the dynamic transportation networks practically, and (2) how to compute ALRQ efficiently. We take two types of dynamic transportation networks into account, and we define a pair of upper and lower bounds to prune the search space effectively. Moreover, a heuristic scheduling strategy is adopted to schedule multiple query sources. Finally, we conducted extensive experiments on real and synthetic spatial data to verify the performance of the developed algorithms.     

Optimizing top-<Emphasis Type="Italic">k</Emphasis> retrieval: submodularity analysis and search strategies

The key issue in top-k retrieval, finding a set of k documents (from a large document collection) that can best answer a user’s query, is to strike the optimal balance between relevance and diversity. In this paper, we study the top-k retrieval problem in the framework of facility location analysis and prove the submodularity of that objective function which provides a theoretical approximation guarantee of factor 1?\(\frac{1}{e}\) for the (best-first) greedy search algorithm. Furthermore, we propose a two-stage hybrid search strategy which first obtains a high-quality initial set of top-k documents via greedy search, and then refines that result set iteratively via local search. Experiments on two large TREC benchmark datasets show that our two-stage hybrid search strategy approach can supersede the existing ones effectively and efficiently.     

Reverse direction-based surrounder queries for mobile recommendations

This paper proposes a new spatial query called a reverse direction-based surrounder (RDBS) query, which retrieves a user who is seeing a point of interest (POI) as one of their direction-based surrounders (DBSs). According to a user, one POI can be dominated by a second POI if the POIs are directionally close and the first POI is farther from the user than the second is. Two POIs are directionally close if their included angle with respect to the user is smaller than an angular threshold ??. If a POI cannot be dominated by another POI, it is a DBS of the user. We also propose an extended query called competitor RDBS query. POIs that share the same RDBSs with another POI are defined as competitors of that POI. We design algorithms to answer the RDBS queries and competitor queries. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithms can answer the queries efficiently.     

A fault tolerant peer-to-peer spatial data structure

In recent years, many layered indexing techniques over distributed hash table (DHT)-based peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have been proposed to realize distributed range search. In this paper, we present a fault tolerant constant degree dynamic Distributed Spatial Data Structure called DSDS that supports orthogonal range search on a set of N d-dimensional points published on n nodes. We describe a total order binary relation algorithm to publish points among supernodes and determine supernode keys. A non-redundant rainbow skip graph is used to coordinate message passing among nodes. The worst case orthogonal range search cost in a d-dimensional DSDS with n nodes is \(O\left (\log n+m+\frac {K}{B}\right )\) messages, where m is the number of nodes intersecting the query, K is the number of points reported in range, and B is the number of points that can fit in one message. A complete backup copy of data points stored in other nodes provides redundancy for our DSDS. This redundancy permits answering a range search query in the case of failure of a single node. For single node failure, the DSDS routing system can be recovered to a fully functional state at a cost of O(log n) messages. Backup sets in DSDS nodes are used to first process a query in the most efficient dimension, and then used to process a query containing the data in a failed node in d-dimensional space. The DSDS search algorithm can process queries in d-dimensional space and still tolerate failure of one node. Search cost in the worst case with a failed node increases to \(O\left (d\log n+dm+\frac {K}{B}\right )\) messages for d dimensions.     

Continuous monitoring of range spatial keyword query over moving objects

In this paper, we propose an efficient solution for processing continuous range spatial keyword queries over moving spatio-textual objects (namely, CRSK-mo queries). Major challenges in efficient processing of CRSK-mo queries are as follows: (i) the query range is determined based on both spatial proximity and textual similarity; thus a straightforward spatial proximity based pruning of the search space is not applicable as any object far from a query location with a high textual similarity score can still be the answer (and vice versa), (ii) frequent location updates may invalidate a query result, and thus require frequent re-computing of the result set for any object updates. To address these challenges, the key idea of our approach is to exploit the spatial and textual upper bounds between queries and objects to form safe zones (at the client-side) and buffer regions (at the server-side), and then use these bounds to quickly prune objects and queries through smart in-memory data structures. We conduct extensive experiments with a synthetic dataset that verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed algorithm.     

Popularity-aware spatial keyword search on activity trajectories

The proliferation of GPS-enabled smart mobile devices enables us to collect a large-scale trajectories of moving objects with GPS tags. While the raw trajectories that only consists of positional information have been studied extensively, many recent works have been focusing on enriching the raw trajectories with semantic knowledge. The resulting data, called activity trajectories, embed the information about behaviors of the moving objects and support a variety of applications for better quality of services. In this paper, we propose a Top-k Spatial Keyword (TkSK) query for activity trajectories, with the objective to find a set of trajectories that are not only close geographically but also meet the requirements of the query semantically. Such kind of query can deliver more informative results than existing spatial keyword queries for static objects, since activity trajectories are able to reflect the popularity of user activities and reveal preferable combinations of facilities. However, it is a challenging task to answer this query efficiently due to the inherent difficulties in indexing trajectories as well as the new complexity introduced by the textual dimension. In this work, we provide a comprehensive solution, including the novel similarity function, hybrid indexing structure, efficient search algorithm and further optimizations. Extensive empirical studies on real trajectory set have demonstrated the scalability of our proposed solution.     

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.     

Top-<Emphasis Type="Italic">k</Emphasis> temporal keyword search over social media data

Social media services have already become main sources for monitoring emerging topics and sensing real-life events. A social media platform manages social stream consisting of a huge volume of timestamped user generated data, including original data and repost data. However, previous research on keyword search over social media data mainly emphasizes on the recency of information. In this paper, we first propose a problem of top-k most significant temporal keyword query to enable more complex query analysis. It returns top-k most popular social items that contain the keywords in the given query time window. Then, we design a temporal inverted index with two-tiers posting list to index social time series and a segment store to compute the exact social significance of social items. Next, we implement a basic query algorithm based on our proposed index structure and give a detailed performance analysis on the query algorithm. From the analysis result, we further refine our query algorithm with a piecewise maximum approximation (PMA) sketch. Finally, extensive empirical studies on a real-life microblog dataset demonstrate the combination of two-tiers posting list and PMA sketch achieves remarkable performance improvement under different query settings.     

The direction-constrained <Emphasis Type="Italic">k</Emphasis> nearest neighbor query

Finding k nearest neighbor objects in spatial databases is a fundamental problem in many geospatial systems and the direction is one of the key features of a spatial object. Moreover, the recent tremendous growth of sensor technologies in mobile devices produces an enormous amount of spatio-directional (i.e., spatially and directionally encoded) objects such as photos. Therefore, an efficient and proper utilization of the direction feature is a new challenge. Inspired by this issue and the traditional k nearest neighbor search problem, we devise a new type of query, called the direction-constrained k nearest neighbor (DCkNN) query. The DCkNN query finds k nearest neighbors from the location of the query such that the direction of each neighbor is in a certain range from the direction of the query. We develop a new index structure called MULTI, to efficiently answer the DCkNN query with two novel index access algorithms based on the cost analysis. Furthermore, our problem and solution can be generalized to deal with spatio-circulant dimensional (such as a direction and circulant periods of time such as an hour, a day, and a week) objects. Experimental results show that our proposed index structure and access algorithms outperform two adapted algorithms from existing kNN algorithms.