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COACT: a query interface language for collaborative databases

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Abstract

Data curation activities in collaborative databases mandate that collaborators interact until they converge and agree on the content of their data. In a previous work, we presented a cloud-based collaborative database system that promotes and enables collaboration and data curation scenarios. Our system classifies different versions of a data item to either pending, approved, or rejected. The approval or rejection of a certain version is done by the database Principle Investigators (or PIs) based on its value. Our system also allows collaborators to view the status of each version and help PIs take decisions by providing feedback based on their experiments and/or opinions. Most importantly, our system provided mechanisms for history tracking of different versions to trace the modifications and approval/rejection done by both collaborators and PIs on different versions of a data item. We labeled our system as Update-Pending-Approval model (or UPA). In this paper, we describe a high level SQL query interface language for PIs and collaborators to interact with the UPA framework. We define a set of UPA keywords that are used as a part of the history tracking mechanism to select specific versions of a data item, and a set of UPA options that select specific versions based on possible future decisions of PIs. We implemented our query interface mechanism on top of Apache Phoenix, taking into consideration that the UPA system was implemented on top of Apache HBase. We test the performance of the UPA query language by executing several queries that contain different complexity levels and discuss their results.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Arts, Sciences and Technology University in Lebanon, Beirut, Lebanon

    Khaleel Mershad

  2. Qatar University, Al Hala St, P.O. Box 2713, Doha, Qatar

    Qutaibah M. Malluhi

  3. Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, Doha, Qatar

    Mourad Ouzzani

  4. Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Mingjie Tang, Michael Gribskov & Walid G. Aref

  5. Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University, Kakryal, J&K, India

    Deo Prakash

Authors
  1. Khaleel Mershad
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  2. Qutaibah M. Malluhi
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  3. Mourad Ouzzani
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  4. Mingjie Tang
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  5. Michael Gribskov
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  6. Walid G. Aref
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  7. Deo Prakash
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Khaleel Mershad.

Additional information

This publication was made possible by the support of an NPRP Grant 4-1534-1-247 from the the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation) and the National Science Foundation under Grants IIS-1117766 and IIS-0964639. The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors.

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Mershad, K., Malluhi, Q.M., Ouzzani, M. et al. COACT: a query interface language for collaborative databases. Distrib Parallel Databases 36, 121–151 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10619-017-7213-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10619-017-7213-1

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