Intranet Mediator

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Intranet Mediator

• Clement Yu
• Department of Computer Science
• University of Illinois at Chicago

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• A simple Query in natural language
• Collaborative databases can be text or
  relational databases possibly with form
  interfaces
• Answer the query using some of the databases

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QUERY
Intranet Mediator
DBMS1
DBMS2
DBMSm

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Environment

• An organization having numerous services
• Users want to utilize these services, but are
  unaware of their existence/how to access those
  services

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Query When did Peter Smith borrow a textbook
which costs more than 60?

• Numerous databases
• Academic standing of students
• Student social activities
• Research activities of faculty members
• Health services
• Library service
• Which databases can answer the query?

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Distance (Database, Query)

• For each database, construct a schema graph
• For the given query, extract query terms
• Associate the query terms to the database
• schema graphs
• Compute a distance between each database graph
  and the query terms
• The database with the least distance from the
  query is the most likely database to answer the
  query

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When, Peter Smith, borrow, textbook, 60, costs

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Research issues

• Necessary and sufficient conditions that the
  least distance database is in fact a correct
  database to answer the given query
• Mapping from natural language query to a
  relational query or a keyword based query
• Automatic construction of ontology
• Multiple databases, including text databases,
  necessary to answer the query
• Internet vs Intranet

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• Keyword-based Search to a Single Database
• Sanjay Agrawal, Surajit Chaudhuri, Gautam Das
  DBXplorer A System for Keyword-Based Search over
  Relational Databases. ICDE 2002
• Gaurav Bhalotia, Arvind Hulgeri, Charuta Nakhe,
  Soumen Chakrabarti, S. Sudarshan Keyword
  Searching and Browsing in Databases using BANKS.
  ICDE 2002
• Vagelis Hristidis, Yannis Papakonstantinou
  DISCOVER Keyword Search in Relational Databases.
  VLDB 2002
• NLI to a Single Database
• Ion Androutsopoulos, G. Ritchie, and P. Thanisch
  Natural Language Interfaces to Databases - An
  Introduction. Journal of Natural Language
  Engineering 1995
• Ana-Maria Popescu, Oren Etzioni, Henry A. Kautz
  Towards a theory of natural language interfaces
  to databases. Intelligent User Interfaces 2003

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• NLI to a Single Database (Cont.)
• Frank Meng and Wesley W. Chu Database query
  formation from natural language using semantic
  modeling and statistical keyword meaning
  disambiguation. CSD-TR 990003, UCLA, 1999
• L. Tang and R. Mooney Using multiple clause
  constructors in inductive logic programming,
  European Conference on Machine Learning,2001.
• Mediator
• David A. Grossman, Steven M. Beitzel, Eric C.
  Jensen, Ophir Frieder The IIT Intranet Mediator
  Bringing Data Together on a Corporate Intranet.
  IEEE IT PRO, January/February 2002.
• Alon Y. Levy, Anand Rajaraman, Joann J. Ordille
  Querying Heterogeneous Information Sources Using
  Source Descriptions. VLDB 1996
• Ontology
• Jiawei Han, Yongjian Fu Dynamic Generation and
  Refinement of Concept Hierarchies for Knowledge
  Discovery in Databases. KDD Workshop 1994
• George A. Miller. WordNet A lexical database for
  English. Communications of the ACM, 38(11), 1995