Schema-as-you-go: on probabilistic tagging and querying of wide tables

The emergence of Web 2.0 has resulted in a huge amount of heterogeneous data that are contributed by a large number of users, engendering new challenges for data management and query processing. Given that the data are unified from various sources and accessed by numerous users, providing users with a unified mediated schema as data integration is insufficient. On one hand, a deterministic mediated schema restricts users’ freedom to express queries in their preferred vocabulary; on the other hand, it is not realistic for users to remember the numerous attribute names that arise from integrating various data sources. As such, a user-oriented data management and query interface is required. In this paper, we propose an out-of-the-box approach that separates users’ actions from database operations. This separating layer deals with the challenges from a semantic perspective. It interprets the semantics of each data value through tags that are provided by users, and then inserts the ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: SIGMOD
• Authors: Meiyu Lu, Divyakant Agrawal, Bing Tian Dai, Anthony K. H. Tung
• Keywords: Box Approach, Database, Query Interface, SIGMOD 2011, Users Actions