Computer Sciences Commons^™

Tuple Source Relational Model: A Source-Aware Data Model For Multidatabases, Ee Peng Lim, Roger Hsiang-Li Chiang, Yinyan Cao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In some integration projects, complete integration of database instances may not be necessary. It may also be too costly and impossible to do so due to poor local data quality and insufficient instance-level knowledge. In this research, we study how multidatabases with global schemas should be represented and manipulated when the data instances from the local databases do not require to be fully integrated. We propose the tuple source (TS) relational model to represent multidatabases under such an integration requirement. This model extends the classical relational model by augmenting every relation with a source attribute to identify the local database …

Web Warehousing System: Design And Issues, Wee-Keong Ng, Ee Peng Lim, Sourav S. Bhowmick, Sanjay Kumar Madria

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The World Wide Web is a distributed global information resource. It contains a large amount of information that have been placed on the web independently by different organizations and thus, related information may appear across different web sites. To manage and access heterogeneous information on WWW, we have started a project of building a web warehouse, called Whoweda (Warehouse of Web Data). Currently, our work on building a web warehousing system has focused on building a data model and designing a web algebra. In this paper, we discuss design and research issues in a web warehousing system. The issues include …

Information Coupling In Web Databases, Sourav S. Bhowmick, Wee-Keong Ng, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Web information coupling refers to an association of topically related web documents. This coupling is initiated explicitly by a user in a web warehouse specially designed for web information. Web information coupling provides the means to derive additional, useful information from the WWW. In this paper, we discuss and show how two web operators, i.e., global web coupling and local web coupling, are used to associate related web information from the WWW and also from multiple web tables in a web warehouse. This paper discusses various issues in web coupling such as coupling semantics, coupling-compability, and coupling evaluation.

A Global Object Model For Accommodating Instance Heterogeneities, Ee Peng Lim, Roger Hsiang-Li Chiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To completely address database integration problems in the context of multidatabase [10] and data warehousing systems, one has to examine various integration and query requirements. Due to various reasons such as poor data quality in local databases, ongoing local database updates, and instance heterogeneities, some instance differences have to be accommodated by the integrated databases. We have therefore proposed a new object-oriented global data model, called OORA, that can accommodate attribute and relationship instance heterogeneities in the integrated database. In addition, the OORA model has been designed to allow database integrators and end users to query both the local and …

Design And Implementation Of A Maritime Conflict Prediction System, Wee-Keong Ng, Ee Peng Lim, Wen Jing Hsu, Yy Cao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Maritime conflicts have serious impacts on Singapore and the surrounding region both economically and environmentally. This is particularly severe for conflicts such as collisions between large vessels or tankers carrying oil and chemicals. Thus, it is in the interests of the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA) to avoid collisions or near-collisions among such vessels navigating through Singapore waters. Existing systems used by MPA predict potential maritime conflicts arising within a short and fixed time horizon. The system produces inconsequential warnings that are often ignored. In this paper, we describe an advanced computerbased system designed to assist in the …

Join Processing In Web Databases, Sourav S. Bhowmick, Wee-Keong Ng, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recently, there has been increasing interests in data models and query languages for unstructured data in the World Wide Web. When web data is harnessed in a web warehouse, new and useful information can be derived through appropriate information manipulation. In our web warehousing project, we introduce a new operator called the web join. Like its relational counterpart, web join combines information from two web tables to yield a new web table. This paper discusses various issues in web join such as join semantics, joinability, and join evaluation.

Querying Structured Web Resources, Ee Peng Lim, Cheng Hai Tan, Boon Wan Lim, Wee-Keong Ng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To provide query facilities over Web resources, several web search engines such as Yahoo, Altavista, Infoseek, etc. have been developed. Most prominently, web search engines have been used to index all web pages on the Internet. The queries supported by these search engines are mainly designed to reveal web pages that meet the search criteria specified by the users. In this way, the search engines have been used as some kind of discovery tools. The queries supported are known as discovery queries. On the other hand, a web search engine can also be used to index and support queries over …

Database Selection Techniques For Routing Bibliographic Queries, Ee Peng Lim, Wee-Keong Ng, Jian Xu, Yinyan Cao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

An Interlibrary Loan System On The World Wide Web, Schubert Shou Boon Foo, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Inter-Library Loan (ILL) service is one of the services provided by libraries that offers users a way to access library resources beyond their affiliated libraries. Additionally, it allows participating libraries to share and maximize their resources. This work examines the ILL process used by libraries in Singapore and proposes that the existing paper-based manual system be replaced by a Web-based ILL system. Such a Web-based system has been successfully designed and implemented at the Nanyang Technological University. The paper presents an overview of the system requirements and architecture, implementation details and demonstrates the feasibility and advantages of the new system.

Evaluation Of Information Modeling Methods: A Review, Keng Siau, Matti Rossi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Hundreds of modeling methods are in existence today. Yet practitioners and researchers are zealously "producing" new modeling methods. The "blooming" of modeling methods is not the problem; the lack of standardize techniques for evaluating them is. To further complicate the matter, most of the modeling methods are introduced based on common sense and intuition. Theoretical foundations and empirical evidence are severely lacking. With the current state of affairs, evaluation of modeling methods has become necessary. Comparing modeling methods provides us with the necessary knowledge and understanding on the strengths and weaknesses of each method. This knowledge can also guide us …

Source-Aware Multidatabase Query Processing, Ee Peng Lim, Yinyan Cao, Roger Hsiang-Li Chiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We introduce a multidatabase model to represent the information that derives from different local databases. This model, known as Tuple-Source (TS) relational model, accommodates tuples from different local databases by attaching them with their source information in the global relations which are also known as TS-relations. In other words, a source attribute is implicit in every TS-relation. To manipulate the global relations, we have developed the TSSQL query language and implemented a distributed query processor to process such queries. In this paper, we report our distributed query processing architecture and algorithms. Our architecture consists of a query mediator and a …

Distributed Query Processing For Structured And Bibliographic Databases, Ee Peng Lim, Ying Lu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To support future digital library systems which draw information from different sources on the internet, we have to provide integrated queries to pre-existing database servers which contain structured, semi-structured and unstructured data. In this paper, we specifically examine the problem of querying both existing structured relational databases and bibliographic databases. By adopting the well-accepted Z39.50 standard protocol to access bibliographic databases in different legacy library systems, we have developed an extended SQL model, known as HarpSQL, to support integrated queries to both SQL databases and bibliographic databases. Using HarpSQL, one can not only query bibliographic databases in an SQL manner, …

Integrated Queries To Existing Bibliographic And Structured Databases, Ee Peng Lim, Ying Lu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

It is widely accepted that future digital library applications have to be built upon different kinds of database servers to draw upon different forms of data, including bibliographic, text, multimedia, and structured data. In this paper, the problem of integrating existing public bibliographic databases and structured databases which reside at different locations in the network is addressed. Although bibliographic data is semistructured, its attribute set is often determined by an international standard known as MARC. To unify bibliographic and structured data, the well-known SQL was extended to model bibliographic related attributes and queries. In particular, a new data type was …

A Hypermedia Database To Manage World-Wide-Web Documents, Schubert Shou Boon Foo, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The surge of interest in the World-Wide-Web (WWW) with its potential commercial payoff has resulted in an explosion of information as organisations join in to publish and do business on the Internet. A related development, Intranet, which basically uses the same technology to build private corporate WWW-based networks, has emerged to provide cost-effective and efficient groupware and information management solutions for organisations. As a result, the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), used for constructing WWW documents, has become a contender for authoring future office documents. With this scenario, this study examines WWW practices and highlights the inadequacy and drawbacks of …

Managing World Wide Web Publications, Schubert Foo, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The surge of interest in the World Wide Web (WWW), with its potential commercial payoff, has resulted in an explosion of information as organizations join in the fray to publish and do business on the Internet. In addition, Intranet, the private corporate WWW‐based network, has also emerged to provide cost‐effective and efficient groupware and information management solutions for organizations. As a result, the HyperText Markup Language used for constructing WWW documents has become a contender for authoring future office documents. Examines the current practices of WWW publishing and highlights its inadequacies and drawbacks. Demonstrates the need and advantages of using …

Low-Degree Graph Partitioning Via Local Search With Applications To Constraint Satisfaction, Max Cut, And Coloring, Magnus M. Halldorsson, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present practical algorithms for constructing partitions of graphs into a fixed number of vertex-disjoint subgraphs that satisfy particular degree constraints. We use this in particular to find k-cuts of graphs of maximum degree ∆ that cut at least a k - 1/k (1 + 1/2∆+k-1 ) fraction of the edges, improving previous bounds known. The partitions also apply to constraint networks, for which we give a tight analysis of natural local search heuristics for the maximum constraint satisfaction problem. These partitions also imply efficient approximations for several problems on weighted bounded-degree graphs. In particular, we improve the best performance …

Analysis Of Digital Logic Schematics Using Image Recognition, James A. Giles

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents the results of research in the area of automated recognition of digital logic schematics. The adaptation of a number of existing image processing techniques for use with this kind of image is discussed, and the concept of using sets of tokens to represent the overall drawing i s explained in detail. Methods are given for using tokens to describe schematic component shapes, to represent the connections between components, and to provide sufficient information to a parser so that an equation can be generated. A Microsoft Windows-based test program which runs under Windows 95 or Windows NT has …

Export Database Derivation Approach For Supporting Object-Oriented Wrapper Queries, Ee Peng Lim, Hon-Kuan Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wrappers export the schema and data of existing heterogeneous databases and support queries on them. In the context of cooperative information systems, we present a flexible approach to specify the derivation of object-oriented (OO) export databases from local relational databases. Our export database derivation consists of a set of extent derivation structures (EDS) which defines the extent and deep extent of export classes. Having well-defined semantics, the EDS can be readily used in transforming wrapper queries to local queries. Based on the EDS, we developed a wrapper query evaluation strategy which handles OO queries on the export databases. The strategy …

Images 2.1 : An Integrated Model Of An Arid Grazing System, Z G. Yan, K M. Wang

Resource management technical reports

The name IMAGES stands for An Integrated Model of an Arid Grazing Ecological System. The model was initiated by Dr R. Hacker in 1987-8 as an activity to (1) evaluate alternative management strategies and (2) identify key ecological processes and research priorities in shrub rangelands of Western Australia. Version 1 of the model was published in Agriculture Systems in 1991 (Hacker et al. 1991) and here after will be referred to as IMAGES 1. IMAGES 1 is a vegetation model, capable of predicting the prob ility of recruitment and mortality of the desirable species in a given vegetation type under …

Monte Carlo Simulations Of Photoemission Characteristics From Gaas And Diamond, Abhishek Srivastava

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Monte Carlo based numerical simulations were performed to study photoemission from GaAs and diamond. The central goal was to assess the potential for NEA photoemission from diamond, and to predict its characteristics. The GaAs material system was also included in the simulation study to provide: (i) calibration and validation of the numerical model developed by carefully matching the simulation results with available experimental data, and (ii) quantitative comparisons between the response characteristics of diamond and the better known GaAs system.

Predictions of the energy distribution, temporal response and angular distribution of emitted electrons were obtained. Effects of various parameters, such …

An Evidential Reasoning Approach To Attribute Value Conflict Resolution In Database Integration, Ee Peng Lim, Jaideep Srivastava, Shashi Shekhar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Resolving domain incompatibility among independently developed databases often involves uncertain information. DeMichiel [1] showed that uncertain information can be generated by the mapping of conflicting attributes to a common domain, based on some domain knowledge. In this paper, we show that uncertain information can also arise when the database integration process requires information not directly represented in the component databases, but can be obtained through some summary of data. We therefore propose an extended relational model based on Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence [2] to incorporate such uncertain knowledge about the source databases. The extended relation uses evidence sets to represent …

On Integrating Existing Bibliographic Databases And Structured Databases, Ying Lu, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

It is widely accepted that future digital library applications have to be built upon different kinds of database servers to draw different forms of data from them. These data include bibliographic data, text data, multimedia data, and structured data. We address the problem of integrating existing bibliographic and structured databases which reside at different locations in the network. To integrate bibliographic data and structured data, we extended the well-known SQL model to represent bibliographic related attributes and queries. In particular, we have added a new data type to model attributes in the bibliographic database. We have also designed specialized predicates …

A New Soft Tissue Analysis : To Establish Facial Esthetic Norms In Young Adult Females, Anne Béress

Loma Linda University Electronic Theses, Dissertations & Projects

Two hundred and fifty-five articles, books, and masters theses were reviewed for the most frequently applied soft tissue measurements in the literature in order to develop a new soft tissue analysis computer program that includes established soft tissue measurements and the newly developed globe analysis. A meta analysis of 20 normal occlusion studies, was performed to obtain mean values and standard deviations to form a large sample size. Inclusion criteria for articles in the meta analysis were normal occlusion, no orthodontic treatment, pleasing faces, statement on age, race, and lip position of the population. For the lateral view, angular and …

Specifying Object-Oriented Federated Database From Existing Databases, Ee Peng Lim, M. L. Lim, J. Srivastava

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we present a mapping strategy that is based on a proposed set of DB integration operations. We first define an OO federated DB as a virtual view on multiple OO export DBs. Our DB mapping strategy systematically derives each of the class extents, deep class extents and relationships of the federated DB using an operator tree consisting of the integration operations. This mapping approach differs from the other existing approaches in that it is algebraic based, and is therefore very suitable for implementing federated query processing.

Supporting Search For Reusable Software Objects, T. Isakowitz, Robert J. Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Prior research has shown that achieving high levels of software reuse in the presence of repository and object-based computer-aided software engineering (CASE) development methods presents interesting human, managerial and technical challenges. This article presents research that seeks to enhanced software development performance through reuse. We propose automated support for developers who search large repositories for the appropriate reusable software objects. We characterize search for repository objects in terms of a multistage model involving screening, identification, and the subsequent choice between new object construction or reusable object implementation. We propose automated support tools, including ORCA, a software Object Reuse Classification Analyzer, …

Gnarly Rantings About The Hacker And The Ants, Rudy Rucker

SWITCH

The article is an excerpt from Rucker’s book “The Happy Mutant”. It begins with his reflection of his career with GoMotion. He discusses the relation that he saw between design and cyberspace. Later he discusses his experience with a game a colleague found on the net: a virtual world where player is an ant. He talks about the struggles he goes through in this virtual world because of game difficulty and poor visuals. He ties it all in with how the Silicon Valley works in a similar way, and is filled with hackers and programers all needing each other to …

How I Got Gnarly, Rudy Rucker

SWITCH

The article describes how Rudy Rucker’s curious interest in celluar automata led to his career in mathematical computer science at San José State University. After conducting interviews on the theory of cellular automata as a freelance writer, he felt compelled to be involved in this great intellectual revolution in computer-aided experimental mathematics. Committed to reinventing himself, Rucker's interactions with mathematicians inspired him to write “Mind Tools”, a book that surveys mathematics from the standpoint that is information. After publishing his book, in 1987, he was eventually offered a position at SJSU in the Mathematics and Computer Science department. With assistance …

Entity Identification In Database Integration, Ee Peng Lim, Jaideep Srivastava, Satya Prabhakar, James Richardson

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The objective of entity identification is to determine the correspondence between objective instances from more than one database. This paper examines the problem at the instance level assuming that schema level heterogeneity has been resolved a priori. Soundness and completeness are defined as the desired properties of any entity-identification technique. To achieve soundness, a set of identity and distinctness rules have to be established for the entities in the integrated world. We then propose the use of extended key, which is the union of keys (and possibly other attributes) from the relations to be matched, and its corresponding identity rule …

Volunteer Water Quality Monitoring Programs: An Assessment Of Public Participation As A Means Of Fostering Environmental Stewardship, Christopher Damon

Marine Affairs Theses and Major Papers

Volunteer water quality monitoring organizations from across the country were surveyed (n=516) to determine the relationship between public involvement and the generation of stewardship within the community. Program coordinators were asked first to rate the level of stewardship values within the community, and then respond to questions covering four broad areas of public involvement: pre-existing conditions, public education, volunteer behavior, and communal involvement. For each question, organizations were aggregated by response, and a frequency analysis was performed to discover the most common responses in each of the four public involvement categories. the mean of perceived stewardship values was graphed as …

Parallel Newton-Krylov-Schwarz Solvers For The Full Potential Flow Equation, Jie Zhang

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Newton-Krylov-Schwarz methods are increasingly applied in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). We develop a parallel analysis code based on this method for the full potential flow model. The full potential model consists of a single nonlinear second-order partial differential equation of mixed type (elliptic/hyperbolic), which we solve as a steady boundary-value problem.

We use a nine-point finite-difference stencil to discretize the equation. A Newtonlike linearization and correction method is used to solve the resulting set of nonlinear algebraic equations. To solve the inner linear equations, we employ a Krylov space method. Preconditioners are used to improve the convergence rate. In order …