Vista University is known in South Africa as a historically disadvantaged or black university. It is a multi-campus university (it has eight campuses throughout South Africa) and caters for learners from historically disadvantaged backgrounds. The Department of Mathematics and Statistics holds an annual meeting to coordinate the activities in the department across all eight campuses. Attendance is compulsory for all lecturers from all the campuses. Every year the same problem arises, which is to have examination papers drawn up that will be of a uniform standard across all the campuses. It is a very frustrating task for the compiler of the papers to get contributions from the lecturers that are submitted on time, in the agreed format and of an acceptable standard. During the 2000 meeting it was unanimously agreed that the long-term solution to the problem would be a database of questions in the agreed format and of an acceptable standard. Because the lecturers are spread over South Africa, this database must be available through Vista’s Intranet. The development of such a product would involve a great deal of time and energy, and the most important question to ask is whether the lecturers would use the product. The solution is to design a prototype of the product: a database with a Web-based portal populated with a sample of questions. The usability of such a database must be determined to ensure the effectiveness of the final product. The aim of this study is, after a prototype of a Web-based Statistical Data and Story Library in the South African Context (in future referred to as SSS) has been implemented, to determine the usability of the product. Copyright 2001, University of Pretoria. All rights reserved. The copyright in this work vests in the University of Pretoria. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the University of Pretoria. Please cite as follows: Basson, EM 2001, The usability of a computer-based Statistics Data and Story Library in the South African context, MEd dissertation, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, viewed yymmdd < http://upetd.up.ac.za/thesis/available/etd-02042002-094953 / > / Thesis (MEd)--University of Pretoria, 2001. / Curriculum Studies / MEd / Unrestricted

The Web-based Independent Study Program (WISP) is an on-line database program used to create and store educational records for members of Dikaios. (Dikaios is a Christian educators association that offers an independent study program.) The database allows home educators to create, store, edit, view, and print the forms and records that are required by Dakaios administrators and by the state of California. Further, the database helps students and home educators monitor student progress towards meeting high school graduation requirements.

This project was done with the vision that it would simplify and improve outpatient treatment of substance abusers through a rehabilitation software program with 24-7 access availability. By developing an easy-to-use interface for out-patient substance abuse patients, they along with their counselors, administrators and insurance agencies, will be able to facilitate continuous communication during the course of a patient's treatment.

In 2005 Mr. Dung Tien Vu completed a master's project for the California State University, San Bernardino Computer Science Department in which he designed a web-based database of department graduate student information. This project was designed to alter the system so that it conforms with current campus regulations, to make some improvements to the system, and to deploy it.

Research in natural language processing (NLP) focuses recently on the development of learned language models called word embedding models like word2vec, fastText, and BERT. Pre-trained on large amounts of unstructured text in natural language, those embedding models constitute a rich source of common knowledge in the domain of the text used for the training. In the NLP community, significant improvements are achieved by using those models together with deep neural network models. To support applications to benefit from word embeddings, we extend the capabilities of traditional relational database systems, which are still by far the most common DBMSs but only provide limited text analysis features. Therefore, we implement (a) novel database operations involving embedding representations to allow a database user to exploit the knowledge encoded in word embedding models for advanced text analysis operations. The integration of those operations into database query language enables users to construct queries using novel word embedding operations in conjunction with traditional query capabilities of SQL. To allow efficient retrieval of embedding representations and fast execution of the operations, we implement (b) novel search algorithms and index structures for approximated kNN-Joins and integrate those into a relational database management system. Moreover, we investigate techniques to optimize embedding representations of text values in database systems. Therefore, we design (c) a novel context adaptation algorithm. This algorithm utilizes the structured data present in the database to enrich the embedding representations of text values to model their context-specific semantic in the database. Besides, we provide (d) support for selecting a word embedding model suitable for a user's application. Therefore, we developed a data processing pipeline to construct a dataset for domain-specific word embedding evaluation. Finally, we propose (e) novel embedding techniques for pre-training on tabular data to support applications working with text values in tables. Our proposed embedding techniques model semantic relations arising from the alignment of words in tabular layouts that can only hardly be derived from text documents, e.g., relations between table schema and table body. In this way, many applications, which either employ embeddings in supervised machine learning models, e.g., to classify cells in spreadsheets, or through the application of arithmetic operations, e.g., table discovery applications, can profit from the proposed embedding techniques.:1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Contribution 1.2 Outline 2 REPRESENTATION OF TEXT FOR NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING 2.1 Natural Language Processing Systems 2.2 Word Embedding Models 2.2.1 Matrix Factorization Methods 2.2.2 Learned Distributed Representations 2.2.3 Contextualize Word Embeddings 2.2.4 Advantages of Contextualize and Static Word Embeddings 2.2.5 Properties of Static Word Embeddings 2.2.6 Node Embeddings 2.2.7 Non-Euclidean Embedding Techniques 2.3 Evaluation of Word Embeddings 2.3.1 Similarity Evaluation 2.3.2 Analogy Evaluation 2.3.3 Cluster-based Evaluation 2.4 Application for Tabular Data 2.4.1 Semantic Search 2.4.2 Data Curation 2.4.3 Data Discovery 3 SYSTEM OVERVIEW 3.1 Opportunities of an Integration 3.2 Characteristics of Word Vectors 3.3 Objectives and Challenges 3.4 Word Embedding Operations 3.5 Performance Optimization of Operations 3.6 Context Adaptation 3.7 Requirements for Model Recommendation 3.8 Tabular Embedding Models 4 MANAGEMENT OF EMBEDDING REPRESENTATIONS IN DATABASE SYSTEMS 4.1 Integration of Operations in an RDBMS 4.1.1 System Architecture 4.1.2 Storage Formats 4.1.3 User-Defined Functions 4.1.4 Web Application 4.2 Nearest Neighbor Search 4.2.1 Tree-based Methods 4.2.2 Proximity Graphs 4.2.3 Locality-Sensitive Hashing 4.2.4 Quantization Techniques 4.3 Applicability of ANN Techniques for Word Embedding kNN-Joins 4.4 Related Work on kNN Search in Database Systems 4.5 ANN-Joins for Relational Database Systems 4.5.1 Index Architecture 4.5.2 Search Algorithm 4.5.3 Distance Calculation 4.5.4 Optimization Capabilities 4.5.5 Estimation of the Number of Targets 4.5.6 Flexible Product Quantization 4.5.7 Further Optimizations 4.5.8 Parameter Tuning 4.5.9 kNN-Joins for Word2Bits 4.6 Evaluation 4.6.1 Experimental Setup 4.6.2 Influence of Index Parameters on Precision and Execution Time 4.6.3 Performance of Subroutines 4.6.4 Flexible Product Quantization 4.6.5 Accuracy of the Target Size Estimation 4.6.6 Performance of Word2Bits kNN-Join 4.7 Summary 5 CONTEXT ADAPTATION FOR WORD EMBEDDING OPTIMIZATION 5.1 Related Work 5.1.1 Graph and Text Joint Embedding Methods 5.1.2 Retrofitting Approaches 5.1.3 Table Embedding Models 5.2 Relational Retrofitting Approach 5.2.1 Data Preparation 5.2.2 Relational Retrofitting Problem 5.2.3 Relational Retrofitting Algorithm 5.2.4 Online-RETRO 5.3 Evaluation Platform: Retro Live 5.3.1 Functionality 5.3.2 Interface 5.4 Evaluation 5.4.1 Datasets 5.4.2 Training of Embeddings 5.4.3 Machine Learning Models 5.4.4 Evaluation of ML Models 5.4.5 Run-time Measurements 5.4.6 Online Retrofitting 5.5 Summary 6 MODEL RECOMMENDATION 6.1 Related Work 6.1.1 Extrinsic Evaluation 6.1.2 Intrinsic Evaluation 6.2 Architecture of FacetE 6.3 Evaluation Dataset Construction Pipeline 6.3.1 Web Table Filtering and Facet Candidate Generation 6.3.2 Check Soft Functional Dependencies 6.3.3 Post-Filtering 6.3.4 Categorization 6.4 Evaluation of Popular Word Embedding Models 6.4.1 Domain-Agnostic Evaluation 6.4.2 Evaluation of a Single Facet 6.4.3 Evaluation of an Object Set 6.5 Summary 7 TABULAR TEXT EMBEDDINGS 7.1 Related Work 7.1.1 Static Table Embedding Models 7.1.2 Contextualized Table Embedding Models 7.2 Web Table Embedding Model 7.2.1 Preprocessing 7.2.2 Text Serialization 7.2.3 Encoding Model 7.2.4 Embedding Training 7.3 Applications for Table Embeddings 7.3.1 Table Union Search 7.3.2 Classification Tasks 7.4 Evaluation 7.4.1 Intrinsic Evaluation 7.4.2 Table Union Search Evaluation 7.4.3 Table Layout Classification 7.4.4 Spreadsheet Cell Classification 7.5 Summary 8 CONCLUSION 8.1 Summary 8.2 Directions for Future Work BIBLIOGRAPHY LIST OF FIGURES LIST OF TABLES A CONVEXITY OF RELATIONAL RETROFITTING B EVALUATION OF THE RELATIONAL RETROFITTING HYPERPARAMETERS

This thesis is focused on the distributed Big Data processing on the Java platform, together with graph databases. It analyses several graph database distributions and the possibilities to connect them to the Apache Hadoop system for distributed data processing. For the purpose of testing database solutions effectiveness, the thesis outcome is an application, which is downloading data from social networks Twitter and Facebook. It is able to write and analyse data with two different database frameworks which are Halyard and HGraphDB.

This master’s thesis aims to design a suitable system based on a relational database for the purposes of administrative activities of the District Football Association. The created relational database should be managed primarily by the association secretary, to a lesser extent by members of association specialist committees. The database should be able to contain all the information and records which have been dealing with the paper form so far (match fixtures, awarding fines, clubs’ fees, players’ punishments, etc.). Routine administrative work, such as reading, inserting, deleting and updating the data will be carried out through the web interface and should not place any special demands on the level of users computer skills.

he goal of this thesis is to analyze current situation in the area of internet commerce and design and implement own application to solve administration of customers and productcs of the firm, which deals with selling musical pieces in electronic form. The main component will be an internet shop based on subscribed custom accounts and enabled prompt offtake of the musical pieces. Designed system will be implemented as a WWW application in PHP language with using database MySQL.

The thesis introduces the basic concepts of graph theory and graph representation both in mathematics and programming. Furthermore, it presents basic methods and problems of graphs searching and theory in general. There are presented graph data management capabilities of different database systems including those directly based on the graph theory. In the practical part, there is designed an efficient method of graphs traversing in PostgreSQL database. The method was tested and demonstrated by the graph search algorithms, coloring and isomorphism.

This thesis deals with the design and implementation of a dynamic user-definable dashboard. The user will be able to define conditions dynamically, which will filter out and save only the data he needs. The application will support the changing of the condition definitions and the display of the graphs after they were created. The current implementations available on the internet are usually solutions designed to fit only one type of project and are not designed to meet general guidelines for a dashboard. The dashboard is designed for a smooth cooperation with high load databases and therefore not to slow down the whole solution.