Database Systems Laboratory, Annual Review 2006, The University of Aizu

Annual Review 2006 > Database Systems Laboratory

Database Systems Laboratory

Sabhash Bhalla
Associate Professor

Introduction

Large applications for Services use database systems as a basic part for web data resources. This year the laboratory published the proceedings of 5th workshop on ”Databases in Networked Information System (DNIS)” with international participation. The delivered lecture and manuscripts have been utilized to develop the state-of-the-art lectures on current research problems. These created a focused view on new research problems. many current aspects of web related research activity were discussed at the workshop.

In addition to complexity in features such as multiple attributed data, many new types of raw data are emerging that need to be captured by DBMSs for information extraction. Many research efforts are being made to make suitable Object-Relational architectures for spatial databases.

Most of the advances in techniques concentrate on capturing more meaning within data. A number of researchers are actively developing improved data management strategies using XML data. This provides a challenging area for study. The domains of activity include :

Mobile computing and databases for electronic commerce;
Large Network Management Database Management Systems, for information exchange through XML; and
Multi-media Synchronization applications
Data Mining and Data Warehousing applications

The Database Systems Laboratory has research activity concentrating on data modeling as well as transaction processing activity.

Data Modeling for Spatial Objects

Information Processing Systems of future will be a combination of integrated components. There will be components for intelligent problem solving, or decision making, components for specialized data processing and components for shared information management. The applications will utilize a shared base of information. Some examples are - business automation, industrial automation, computer-aided design and manufacture, and cartography.

Work-flow and Web Services

Traditional approaches to transaction management introduce elements of unpredictable delays during transaction processing. Thus, making these not suitable for adoption in new application environments. The techniques for time-critical transactions are applicable to Mobile databases and multimedia databases.

Digital Library Studies

The goal of this research is to study the feasibility to endow a computational system with the ability to process information. As an experimental platform the laboratory is building a web retrieval system that enables users to retrieve multimedia information carrying a given subjective (Kansei) content. Such system will prove useful in various areas of information technology such as online shopping, advertising industry, entertainment, design, wearable computers. The modeling issues are reformulated from the complementary points of view:

a multimedia data mining approach to address the mapping between impression (or Kansei) words and multimedia impressions,
An approach that involves the user in the modeling process.

Prototype systems to access dynamic contents through web based information systems are in progress. These emulate mobile e-commerce activity in banking and Geographic Information Systems, for test and studies.

Refereed Journal Papers

[bhalla-01:2006]	Shin’ichirou Saeki, Subhash Bhalla, and Masaki Hasegawa. Parallel Generation of Base Relation Snapshots for Materialized View Maintenance in Data Warehouse Environment. International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 3(2):166-172, March 2007.
	Data warehouses are used in many applications that depend on distributed systems. A data warehouse supports information processing by providing a single platform of integrated, historical data for doing analysis. Data warehouses provide the facility for integration in a world of unintegrated application systems. The contents of a data warehouse are evolved in an evolutionary, step-at-a-time fashion. Data warehouse organizes and stores the data needed for informational, analytical processing over a long historical time perspective. Data warehouses keep a materialized view (such as historical data), and user queries are processed using this view. The view has to be maintained to reflect the updates done against the base relations stored at the various distributed data sources. This study considers the materialized view and its maintenance. Various implementation and performance evaluation of the differential snapshot algorithms have been compared for evaluation of suitable alternatives.
[bhalla-02:2006]	Subhash Bhalla, Masaki Hasegawa, and Nadia Berthouze. Computational Interface for Web-based Access to Dynamic Contents. International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2(5/6):302- 306, January 2007.
	Most information systems depend on a Database Management System (DBMS) to organize information. Access to such an information system is based on use of a database query language on the part of the user. This poses a skill level problem for medical staff at a hospital. As a result medical staff tend to depend on the database specialists, and programmers for access to information. To eliminate the complexities of a query language and to make a ubiquitous access a web based information access system has been proposed for the end users.

Refereed Proceeding Papers

[bhalla-03:2006]	Subhash Bhalla and Masaki Hasegawa. A Query Interface for Ubiquitous Access to Database Resources. In Anthony K. H. Tung and Laks V.S. Lakshmanan, editors, Proceedings of Conference on Management of Data (COMAD06). Tata McGraw Hill, December 2006.
	Most information systems depend on a Database Management System (DBMS) to organize information. Access to such an information system is based on use of a database query language on the part of the user. This poses user skills and skill levels, as problem. For example, for medical staff at a hospital, users can not spare time to learn a database query language. As a result medical staff tend to depend on specialists, and programmers for access to information. To eliminate the complexities of a query language and to make a ubiquitous access a web based information access system has been proposed for the end users. The test prototype is based on a step-by-step procedure using query-by-object.
[bhalla-04:2006]	Masaki Hasegawa and Subhash Bhalla. Lowering the Barrier of Query Language Skills within Mobile and Web User Interface Environments. In Proceedings of 2006 Japan-China joint Workshop on Frontier of Computer Science and Technology, pages 147-156, New York, USA, November 2006. IEEE Computer Society.
	Many research efforts aim to provide access to database systems (through the world wide web). At the human end, few users have database query language skills. Most users of the web are highly skilled at referring to tabular data. A natural inclination exists among the users for object-by-object traction to find information. Similarly, In another context, users of geographic maps tend to locate objects and path by following an item-wise (a step-wise) approach. We propose a similar approach for web information systems users. The proposed interface introduces simplicity and avoids communication ambiguities. It provides an interface between the user and the SQL query language.
[bhalla-05:2006]	Shapiee Abd Rahman and Subhash Bhalla. A Mobile Device User Level Interface for Dynamic Access to Spatial Data. In Proceedings of 6th IEEE International Conference on Information Technology (CIT’06), pages 13-20, New York, USA, September 2006. IEEE, IEEE Computer Society.
	The use of handheld devices, such as cell phones, PDAs or pocket computers as tools for querying spatial data in mobile environments, is becoming increasingly popular. Thus, there is a need for simple and user-friendly interfaces to allow users to pose adhoc queries. At present, Query-By-Example (QBE) is available as a user-friendly interface, developed for accessing a RDBMS on a desktop computer. In this paper, we propose extensions for QBE to support spatial queries on mobile devices. It is accordingly named as Spatial mQBE (m stands for mobile). An empirical study shows that Spatial mQBE is a simple and an intuitive interface which facilitates the dynamic expression of both spatial and common database queries. The main strengths of this interface are its simplicity to express a query and its expressive power
[bhalla-06:2006]	Shapiee Abd Rahman and Subhash Bhalla. Spatial Extensions to Query-By-Example for Geographic Information System Queries. In Proceedings of IADIS International Conference on e-Society, Dublin, Ireland, July 2006. International Association Development of Information Society.
	Spatial data is used in many applications such as land management, urban planning, tourism, vehicle guidance and navigation, and e-commerce.Many such applications have recently migrated towards citizen-oriented applications. These applications require a definition of simple and user-friendly interfaces to allow users to pose ad-hoc querries. This paper makes an effort to make spatial extentions to QBE.