Ph.D
Group : Large-scale Heterogeneous DAta and Knowledge

Efficient querying for the semantic Web

Starts on 01/10/2010
Advisor : GOASDOUE, François

Funding :
Affiliation : Université Paris-Saclay
Laboratory : LRI IASI

Defended on 27/09/2013, committee :

Research activities :

Abstract :
Since the beginning of the Semantic Web, RDF and SPARQL have become the standard data model and query language to describe resources on the Web. Large amounts of RDF data are now available either as stand-alone datasets or as metadata over semi-structured documents, typically XML. The ability to apply RDF annotations over XML data emphasizes the need to represent and query data and metadata simultaneously. While significant efforts have been invested into producing and publishing annotations manually or automatically, little attention has been devoted to exploiting such data.
This thesis aims at setting database foundations for the management of hybrid XML-RDF data. We present a data model capturing the structural aspects of XML data and the semantics of RDF. Our model is general enough to describe pure XML or RDF datasets, as well as RDF-annotated XML data, where any XML node can act as a resource. We also introduce the XRQ query language that combines features of both XQuery and SPARQL. XRQ not only allows querying the structure of documents and the semantics of their annotations, but also producing annotated semi-structured data on-the-fly.
We introduce the problem of query composition in XRQ, and exhaustively study query evaluation techniques for XR data to demonstrate the feasibility of this data management setting. We have developed an XR platform on top of well-known data management systems for XML and RDF. The platform features several query processing algorithms, whose performance is experimentally compared. We present an application built on top of the XR platform. The application provides manual and automatic annotation tools, and an interface to query annotated Web page and publicly available XML and RDF datasets concurrently. As a generalization of RDF and SPARQL, XR and XRQ enables RDFS-type of query answering. In this respect, we present a technique to support RDFS-entailments in RDF (and by extension XR) data management systems.

CAUSAL LEARNING FOR DIAGNOSTIC SUPPORT


CAUSAL UNCERTAINTY QUANTIFICATION UNDER PARTIAL KNOWLEDGE AND LOW DATA REGIMES


MICRO VISUALIZATIONS: DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF VISUALIZATIONS FOR SMALL DISPLAY SPACES
The topic of this habilitation is the study of very small data visualizations, micro visualizations, in display contexts that can only dedicate minimal rendering space for data representations. For several years, together with my collaborators, I have been studying human perception, interaction, and analysis with micro visualizations in multiple contexts. In this document I bring together three of my research streams related to micro visualizations: data glyphs, where my joint research focused on studying the perception of small-multiple micro visualizations, word-scale visualizations, where my joint research focused on small visualizations embedded in text-documents, and small mobile data visualizations for smartwatches or fitness trackers. I consider these types of small visualizations together under the umbrella term ``micro visualizations.'' Micro visualizations are useful in multiple visualization contexts and I have been working towards a better understanding of the complexities involved in designing and using micro visualizations. Here, I define the term micro visualization, summarize my own and other past research and design guidelines and outline several design spaces for different types of micro visualizations based on some of the work I was involved in since my PhD.