ABSTRACT
A growing number of databases especially those published on the Web are becoming available to external users. Users of these databases are provided simple form-based query interfaces that hide the underlying schematic details. Constrained by the expressiveness of the query interface users often have difficulty in articulating a precise query over the database. Supporting imprecise queries over such systems would allow users to quickly find relevant answers without iteratively refining their queries. For databases to support imprecise queries they must provide answers that closely match the query constraints. In this paper we focus on answering imprecise user queries without changing the existing database system. We propose to support imprecise queries over a database by identifying a set of related precise queries that provide answers that are relevant to the user given query. We present a domain independent approach based on information retrieval techniques to estimate the distance between queries. To demonstrate the utility and usefulness of our approach we perform usability tests and provide results.
- W. Cohen. Integration of heterogeneous databases without common domains using queries based on textual similarity. Proc. of SIGMOD, pages 201--212, June 1998. Google ScholarDigital Library
- R. Goldman, N .Shivakumar, S. Venkatasubramanian, and H. Garcia-Molina. Proximity search in databases. VLDB, 1998. Google ScholarDigital Library
- T. Haveliwala, A. Gionis, D. Klein, and P Indyk. Evaluating strategies for similarity search on the web. Proceedings of WWW, Hawai, USA, May 2002. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. M. Morrissey. Imprecise information and uncertainty in information systems. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 8:159--180, April 1990. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Motro. Vague: A user interface to relational databases that permits vague queries. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 6(3):187--214, 1998. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Z. Nie, S. Kambhampati, and T. Hernandez. BibFinder/StatMiner: Effectively Mining and Using Coverage and Overlap Statistics in Data Integration. VLDB, 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Micheal Ortega-Binderberger. Integrating Similarity Based Retrieval and Query Refinement in Databases. PhD thesis, UIUC, 2002. Google ScholarDigital Library
- NKICDE:04 Z. Nie and S. Kambhampati. A Frequency Based Approach for Mining Coverage Statistics in Data Integration. to appear in ICDE 2004. Google ScholarDigital Library
- R. Baeza-Yates and B. Ribiero-Neto. Modern Information Retrieval. Addison Wesley Longman Publishing, May 1999. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Answering imprecise database queries: a novel approach
Recommendations
Mining approximate functional dependencies and concept similarities to answer imprecise queries
WebDB '04: Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on the Web and Databases: colocated with ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2004Current approaches for answering queries with imprecise constraints require users to provide distance metrics and importance measures for attributes of interest. In this paper we focus on providing a domain and end-user independent solution for ...
Imprecise RDQL: towards generic retrieval in ontologies using similarity joins
SAC '06: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM symposium on Applied computingTraditional semantic web query languages support a logic-based access to the semantic web. They offer a retrieval (or reasoning) of data based on facts. On the traditional web and in databases, however, exact querying often provides an incomplete answer ...
Comments