<p>XML was designed to be a new standard for marking up data on the web. However, as a result of its extensible and flexible properties, XML is now being used more and more for other purposes than was originally intended. Today XML is prompting an approach more focused on data exchange, between different applications inside companies or even between cooperating businesses.</p><p>Businesses are showing interest in using XML as an integral part of their work. Ericsson Microwave Systems (EMW) is a company that sees XML as a conceivable solution to problems in the work with radar communications. An approach towards a solution based on a relational database system has earlier been analysed.</p><p>In this project we present an investigation of the work at EMW, and identification and documentation of the problems in the radar communication work. Also, the requirements and expectations that EMW has on XML are presented. Moreover, an analysis has been made to decide to what extent XML could be used to solve the problems of EMW. The analysis was conducted by elucidating the problems and possibilities of XML compared to the previous approach for solving the problems at EMW, which was based on using a relational database management system.</p><p>The analysis shows that XML has good features for representing hierarchically structured data, as in the EMW case. It is also shown that XML is good for data integration purposes. Furthermore, the analysis shows that XML, due to its self-describing and weak typing nature, is inappropriate to use in the data semantics and integrity problem context of EMW. However, it also shows that the new XML Schema standard could be used as a complement to the core XML standard, to partially solve the semantics problems.</p>

Web services have been developed as an attractive paradigm for publishing, discovering and consuming services. They are loosely-coupled applications that can be run alone or be composed to create new value-added services. They can be consumed as individual services which provide a unique interface to receive inputs and return outputs; or they can be consumed as components to be integrated into business processes. We call the first consumption case individual use and the second case business process use. The requirement of specific tools to assist consumers in the two service consumption cases involves many researches in both academics and industry. On the one hand, many service portals and service crawlers have been developed as specific tools to assist users to search and invoke Web services for individual use. However, current approaches take mainly into account explicit knowledge presented by service descriptions. They make recommendations without considering data that reflect user interest and may require additional information from users. On the other hand, some business process mechanisms to search for similar business process models or to use reference models have been developed. These mechanisms are used to assist process analysts to facilitate business process design. However, they are labor-intense, error-prone, time-consuming, and may make business analyst confused. In our work, we aim at facilitating the service consumption for individual use and business process use using recommendation techniques. We target to recommend users services that are close to their interest and to recommend business analysts services that are relevant to an ongoing designed business process. To recommend services for individual use, we take into account the user's usage data which reflect the user's interest. We apply well-known collaborative filtering techniques which are developed for making recommendations. We propose five algorithms and develop a web-based application that allows users to use services. To recommend services for business process use, we take into account the relations between services in business processes. We target to recommend relevant services to selected positions in a business process. We define the neighborhood context of a service. We make recommendations based on the neighborhood context matching. Besides, we develop a query language to allow business analysts to formally express constraints to filter services. We also propose an approach to extract the service's neighborhood context from business process logs. Finally, we develop three applications to validate our approach. We perform experiments on the data collected by our applications and on two large public datasets. Experimental results show that our approach is feasible, accurate and has good performance in real use-cases

An increasing amount of data is published as semistructured documents formatted with presentational markup. Examples include data objects such as mathematical expressions encoded with MathML or web pages encoded with XHTML. Our intention is to improve the state of the art in retrieving, manipulating, or mining such data. We focus first on mathematics retrieval, which is appealing in various domains, such as education, digital libraries, engineering, patent documents, and medical sciences. Capturing the similarity of mathematical expressions also greatly enhances document classification in such domains. Unlike text retrieval, where keywords carry enough semantics to distinguish text documents and rank them, math symbols do not contain much semantic information on their own. Unfortunately, considering the structure of mathematical expressions to calculate relevance scores of documents results in ranking algorithms that are computationally more expensive than the typical ranking algorithms employed for text documents. As a result, current math retrieval systems either limit themselves to exact matches, or they ignore the structure completely; they sacrifice either recall or precision for efficiency. We propose instead an efficient end-to-end math retrieval system based on a structural similarity ranking algorithm. We describe novel optimization techniques to reduce the index size and the query processing time. Thus, with the proposed optimizations, mathematical contents can be fully exploited to rank documents in response to mathematical queries. We demonstrate the effectiveness and the efficiency of our solution experimentally, using a special-purpose testbed that we developed for evaluating math retrieval systems. We finally extend our retrieval system to accommodate rich queries that consist of combinations of math expressions and textual keywords. As a second focal point, we address the problem of recognizing structural repetitions in typical web documents. Most web pages use presentational markup standards, in which the tags control the formatting of documents rather than semantically describing their contents. Hence, their structures typically contain more irregularities than descriptive (data-oriented) markup languages. Even though applications would greatly benefit from a grammar inference algorithm that captures structure to make it explicit, the existing algorithms for XML schema inference, which target data-oriented markup, are ineffective in inferring grammars for web documents with presentational markup. There is currently no general-purpose grammar inference framework that can handle irregularities commonly found in web documents and that can operate with only a few examples. Although inferring grammars for individual web pages has been partially addressed by data extraction tools, the existing solutions rely on simplifying assumptions that limit their application. Hence, we describe a principled approach to the problem by defining a class of grammars that can be inferred from very small sample sets and can capture the structure of most web documents. The effectiveness of this approach, together with a comparison against various classes of grammars including DTDs and XSDs, is demonstrated through extensive experiments on web documents. We finally use the proposed grammar inference framework to extend our math retrieval system and to optimize it further.

O modelo TF-ORM (Temporal Functionality in Objects With Roles Model) é um modelo de dados temporal orientado a objetos que utiliza o conceito de papeis para representar os diferentes comportamentos dos objetos. 0 modelo permite a modelagem dos aspectos estáticos e dinâmicos da aplicação pois considera todos os estados dos objetos ao longo de sua evolução. Sua linguagem de consulta e baseada na linguagem SQL e possibilita a recuperação de diferentes histórias do banco de dados. Este trabalho apresenta um sistema visual de consulta para o modelo TFORM. O VQS TF-ORM (Visual Query System TF-ORM) é um ambiente para recuperação de informações temporais. O sistema permite que as consultas sejam elaboradas de três formas alternativas: textual, gráfica ou por formulários. A linguagem gráfica possui o mesmo poder de expressão da linguagem textual, permitindo que a consulta seja elaborada diretamente sobre o esquema conceitual gráfico do modelo com o auxilio de um conjunto de janelas e elementos visuais. A recuperação de informações utilizando-se formulários não possui o mesmo poder de expressão da linguagem textual, mas possibilita a recuperação dos valores das propriedades de um determinado objeto através de uma hierarquia de janelas. A recuperação de informações através do sistema visual de consulta do modelo apresenta algumas facilidades tais como: representação visual dos operadores temporais do modelo, definição de níveis de detalhe e navegação sobre o esquema gráfico, armazenamento das consultas para posterior utilizando, possibilidade de representar uma consulta textual na forma visual e vice-versa, entre outras. Alem da preocupação com a definição de restrições temporais, o ambiente considera ainda as diferentes formas de apresentação do resultado da consulta que podem ser selecionadas pelo usuário. No sistema apresentado neste trabalho, o modelo TF-ORM é implementado em um banco de dados relacional que utiliza a linguagem SQL para recuperação de informações. Para a implementação do modelo em um banco de dados relacional foi feito um mapeamento, que determina como os conceitos de orientação a objetos, papel e tempo devem ser mapeados para tabelas e atributos no modelo relacional. As consultas realizadas na linguagem TF-ORM são então traduzidas para a linguagem de consulta do banco de dados relacional. O ambiente foi implementado utilizando a ferramenta para desenvolvimento de aplicações Delphi e o banco de dados Watcom, um banco de dados relacional que permite a recuperação de informações no padrão SQL/ANSI. / TF-ORM model (Temporal Functionality in Objects with Roles Model) is an object-oriented temporal data model which uses the role concept to represent different behaviors of objects. The model allows modelling of the static and the dynamic aspects of an application representing all the states of its evolution. The TF-ORM query language is based on the SQL language and enables the recovery of different database histories. This work represents a visual query system for the TF-ORM model. The VQS TF-ORM (Visual Query System TF-ORM) is an environment for recovery of temporal information. The system allows queries to be elaborated in three alternatives way: textual, graphic or by forms. The graphic language has the same functionality of the textual lan g uage permitting the query to be elaborated directly on the graphic conceptual schema of the model this operation is supported by a set of windows and visual elements. The information recovery using forms doesn't have the same functionality of the textual lan guage, but enables recovery of property values of an object through window hierarchies. Information recovery using the visual query system of the model presents some facilities: the visual representation of temporal operators, different levels of details for the navigation on the graphic schema, query storage for later use, possibility of representing a textual query in a visual way and vice-versa. The environment supports the definition of temporal constraints and the selection by the user of different representations forms for the results of a query. In the presented system, the TF-ORM model is implemented in a relational database which uses SQL language for information recovery. In order to implement the model in a relational database, a mapping was done - the concepts of the object orientation, roles and time were mapped in to tables and attributes to the relational model. The queries performed in the TF-ORM language are translated into the query lan guage of relational database. The environment was implemented using Delphi and the Watcom database, a relational database which allows information recovery in SQL/ANSI standard.

O modelo TF-ORM (Temporal Functionality in Objects With Roles Model) é um modelo de dados temporal orientado a objetos que utiliza o conceito de papeis para representar os diferentes comportamentos dos objetos. 0 modelo permite a modelagem dos aspectos estáticos e dinâmicos da aplicação pois considera todos os estados dos objetos ao longo de sua evolução. Sua linguagem de consulta e baseada na linguagem SQL e possibilita a recuperação de diferentes histórias do banco de dados. Este trabalho apresenta um sistema visual de consulta para o modelo TFORM. O VQS TF-ORM (Visual Query System TF-ORM) é um ambiente para recuperação de informações temporais. O sistema permite que as consultas sejam elaboradas de três formas alternativas: textual, gráfica ou por formulários. A linguagem gráfica possui o mesmo poder de expressão da linguagem textual, permitindo que a consulta seja elaborada diretamente sobre o esquema conceitual gráfico do modelo com o auxilio de um conjunto de janelas e elementos visuais. A recuperação de informações utilizando-se formulários não possui o mesmo poder de expressão da linguagem textual, mas possibilita a recuperação dos valores das propriedades de um determinado objeto através de uma hierarquia de janelas. A recuperação de informações através do sistema visual de consulta do modelo apresenta algumas facilidades tais como: representação visual dos operadores temporais do modelo, definição de níveis de detalhe e navegação sobre o esquema gráfico, armazenamento das consultas para posterior utilizando, possibilidade de representar uma consulta textual na forma visual e vice-versa, entre outras. Alem da preocupação com a definição de restrições temporais, o ambiente considera ainda as diferentes formas de apresentação do resultado da consulta que podem ser selecionadas pelo usuário. No sistema apresentado neste trabalho, o modelo TF-ORM é implementado em um banco de dados relacional que utiliza a linguagem SQL para recuperação de informações. Para a implementação do modelo em um banco de dados relacional foi feito um mapeamento, que determina como os conceitos de orientação a objetos, papel e tempo devem ser mapeados para tabelas e atributos no modelo relacional. As consultas realizadas na linguagem TF-ORM são então traduzidas para a linguagem de consulta do banco de dados relacional. O ambiente foi implementado utilizando a ferramenta para desenvolvimento de aplicações Delphi e o banco de dados Watcom, um banco de dados relacional que permite a recuperação de informações no padrão SQL/ANSI. / TF-ORM model (Temporal Functionality in Objects with Roles Model) is an object-oriented temporal data model which uses the role concept to represent different behaviors of objects. The model allows modelling of the static and the dynamic aspects of an application representing all the states of its evolution. The TF-ORM query language is based on the SQL language and enables the recovery of different database histories. This work represents a visual query system for the TF-ORM model. The VQS TF-ORM (Visual Query System TF-ORM) is an environment for recovery of temporal information. The system allows queries to be elaborated in three alternatives way: textual, graphic or by forms. The graphic language has the same functionality of the textual lan g uage permitting the query to be elaborated directly on the graphic conceptual schema of the model this operation is supported by a set of windows and visual elements. The information recovery using forms doesn't have the same functionality of the textual lan guage, but enables recovery of property values of an object through window hierarchies. Information recovery using the visual query system of the model presents some facilities: the visual representation of temporal operators, different levels of details for the navigation on the graphic schema, query storage for later use, possibility of representing a textual query in a visual way and vice-versa. The environment supports the definition of temporal constraints and the selection by the user of different representations forms for the results of a query. In the presented system, the TF-ORM model is implemented in a relational database which uses SQL language for information recovery. In order to implement the model in a relational database, a mapping was done - the concepts of the object orientation, roles and time were mapped in to tables and attributes to the relational model. The queries performed in the TF-ORM language are translated into the query lan guage of relational database. The environment was implemented using Delphi and the Watcom database, a relational database which allows information recovery in SQL/ANSI standard.

O modelo TF-ORM (Temporal Functionality in Objects With Roles Model) é um modelo de dados temporal orientado a objetos que utiliza o conceito de papeis para representar os diferentes comportamentos dos objetos. 0 modelo permite a modelagem dos aspectos estáticos e dinâmicos da aplicação pois considera todos os estados dos objetos ao longo de sua evolução. Sua linguagem de consulta e baseada na linguagem SQL e possibilita a recuperação de diferentes histórias do banco de dados. Este trabalho apresenta um sistema visual de consulta para o modelo TFORM. O VQS TF-ORM (Visual Query System TF-ORM) é um ambiente para recuperação de informações temporais. O sistema permite que as consultas sejam elaboradas de três formas alternativas: textual, gráfica ou por formulários. A linguagem gráfica possui o mesmo poder de expressão da linguagem textual, permitindo que a consulta seja elaborada diretamente sobre o esquema conceitual gráfico do modelo com o auxilio de um conjunto de janelas e elementos visuais. A recuperação de informações utilizando-se formulários não possui o mesmo poder de expressão da linguagem textual, mas possibilita a recuperação dos valores das propriedades de um determinado objeto através de uma hierarquia de janelas. A recuperação de informações através do sistema visual de consulta do modelo apresenta algumas facilidades tais como: representação visual dos operadores temporais do modelo, definição de níveis de detalhe e navegação sobre o esquema gráfico, armazenamento das consultas para posterior utilizando, possibilidade de representar uma consulta textual na forma visual e vice-versa, entre outras. Alem da preocupação com a definição de restrições temporais, o ambiente considera ainda as diferentes formas de apresentação do resultado da consulta que podem ser selecionadas pelo usuário. No sistema apresentado neste trabalho, o modelo TF-ORM é implementado em um banco de dados relacional que utiliza a linguagem SQL para recuperação de informações. Para a implementação do modelo em um banco de dados relacional foi feito um mapeamento, que determina como os conceitos de orientação a objetos, papel e tempo devem ser mapeados para tabelas e atributos no modelo relacional. As consultas realizadas na linguagem TF-ORM são então traduzidas para a linguagem de consulta do banco de dados relacional. O ambiente foi implementado utilizando a ferramenta para desenvolvimento de aplicações Delphi e o banco de dados Watcom, um banco de dados relacional que permite a recuperação de informações no padrão SQL/ANSI. / TF-ORM model (Temporal Functionality in Objects with Roles Model) is an object-oriented temporal data model which uses the role concept to represent different behaviors of objects. The model allows modelling of the static and the dynamic aspects of an application representing all the states of its evolution. The TF-ORM query language is based on the SQL language and enables the recovery of different database histories. This work represents a visual query system for the TF-ORM model. The VQS TF-ORM (Visual Query System TF-ORM) is an environment for recovery of temporal information. The system allows queries to be elaborated in three alternatives way: textual, graphic or by forms. The graphic language has the same functionality of the textual lan g uage permitting the query to be elaborated directly on the graphic conceptual schema of the model this operation is supported by a set of windows and visual elements. The information recovery using forms doesn't have the same functionality of the textual lan guage, but enables recovery of property values of an object through window hierarchies. Information recovery using the visual query system of the model presents some facilities: the visual representation of temporal operators, different levels of details for the navigation on the graphic schema, query storage for later use, possibility of representing a textual query in a visual way and vice-versa. The environment supports the definition of temporal constraints and the selection by the user of different representations forms for the results of a query. In the presented system, the TF-ORM model is implemented in a relational database which uses SQL language for information recovery. In order to implement the model in a relational database, a mapping was done - the concepts of the object orientation, roles and time were mapped in to tables and attributes to the relational model. The queries performed in the TF-ORM language are translated into the query lan guage of relational database. The environment was implemented using Delphi and the Watcom database, a relational database which allows information recovery in SQL/ANSI standard.

XML was designed to be a new standard for marking up data on the web. However, as a result of its extensible and flexible properties, XML is now being used more and more for other purposes than was originally intended. Today XML is prompting an approach more focused on data exchange, between different applications inside companies or even between cooperating businesses. Businesses are showing interest in using XML as an integral part of their work. Ericsson Microwave Systems (EMW) is a company that sees XML as a conceivable solution to problems in the work with radar communications. An approach towards a solution based on a relational database system has earlier been analysed. In this project we present an investigation of the work at EMW, and identification and documentation of the problems in the radar communication work. Also, the requirements and expectations that EMW has on XML are presented. Moreover, an analysis has been made to decide to what extent XML could be used to solve the problems of EMW. The analysis was conducted by elucidating the problems and possibilities of XML compared to the previous approach for solving the problems at EMW, which was based on using a relational database management system. The analysis shows that XML has good features for representing hierarchically structured data, as in the EMW case. It is also shown that XML is good for data integration purposes. Furthermore, the analysis shows that XML, due to its self-describing and weak typing nature, is inappropriate to use in the data semantics and integrity problem context of EMW. However, it also shows that the new XML Schema standard could be used as a complement to the core XML standard, to partially solve the semantics problems.

Dans cette thèse, nous nous intéressons aux proportions analogiques dans le contexte des bases de données relationnelles. Les proportions analogiques permettent de lier quatre éléments dans une relation du type ''A est à B ce que C est à D''. Par exemple, « Paris est à la France ce que Rome est à l'Italie ». Nous avons étudié le problème de la prédiction de valeurs manquantes dans une base de données en utilisant les proportions analogiques. Un algorithme de classification fondé sur les proportions analogiques a été modifié afin de résoudre ce problème. Puis, nous avons étudié les propriétés des éléments appartenant à l'ensemble d'apprentissage des classificateurs analogiques fréquemment exploités pour calculer la prédiction. Ceci nous a permis de réduire considérablement la taille de cet ensemble par élimination des éléments peu pertinents et par conséquent, de diminuer les temps d'exécution de ces classificateurs. La deuxième partie de la thèse a pour objectif de découvrir de nouveaux patrons basés sur la relation d'analogie, i.e., des parallèles, dans les bases de données. Nous avons montré qu'il est possible d'extraire ces patrons en s'appuyant sur des approches de clustering. Les clusters produits par de telles techniques présentent aussi un intérêt pour l'évaluation de requêtes recherchant des patrons d'analogie dans les bases de données. Dans cette perspective, nous avons proposé d'étendre le langage de requêtes SQL pour pouvoir trouver des quadruplets d'une base de données satisfaisant une proportion analogique. Nous avons proposé différentes stratégies d'évaluation pour de telles requêtes, et avons comparé expérimentalementleurs performances. / In this thesis, we are interested in the notion of analogical proportions in a relational database context. An analogical proportion is a statement of the form “A is to B as C is to D”, expressing that the relation beween A and B is the same as the relation between C and D. For instance, one may say that “Paris is to France as Rome is to Italy”. We studied the problem of imputing missing values in a relational database by means of analogical proportions. A classification algorithm based on analogical proportions has been modified in order to impute missing values. Then, we studied how analogical classifiers work in order to see if their processing could be simplified. We showed how some typeof analogical proportions is more useful than the others when performing classification. We then proposed an algorithm using this information, which allowed us to considerably reduce the size of the training set used by the analogical classificationalgorithm, and hence to reduce its execution time. In the second part of this thesis, we payed a particular attention to the mining of combinations of four tuples bound by an analogical relationship. For doing so, we used several clustering algorithms, and we proposed some modifications to them, in order tomake each obtained cluster represent a set of analogical proportions. Using the results of the clustering algorithms, we studied how to efficiently retrieve the analogical proportions in a database by means of queries. For doing so, we proposed to extend the SQL query language in order to retrieve from a database the quadruples of tuples satisfying an analogical proportion. We proposed severalquery evaluation strategies and experimentally compared their performances.

Apesar de muito trabalho ter sido dispendido sobre linguagens de consulta a Sistemas de Gerenciamento de Bancos de Dados Relacionais, existem somente dois paradigmas básicos para essas linguagens, que são representados pela Structured Query Language – SQL e pela Query by Example – QBE. Apesar dessas linguagens de consultas serem computacionalmente completas, elas tem a desvantagem de não permitir ao usuário nenhuma interação gráfica com a informação contida na base de dados. Um dos principais desenvolvimentos na área de base de dados diz respeito às ferramentas que proveêm aos usuários um entendimento simples da base de dados e uma extração amigável da informação. A linguagem descrita neste trabalho possibilita que usuários criem consultas graficamente por meio de diagramas de fluxo de dados. Além da linguagem de consulta gráfica, este trabalho mostra também a ferramenta de apoio Data Flow Query Language - DFQL, que é um editor/executor de consultas construído para suportar essa linguagem, através de um conjunto de operadores representados graficamente, e a execução desses diagramas, analisando a rede e gerando os comandos correspondentes em SQL para realização da consulta. Esses comandos são submetidos ao sistema de gerenciamento de banco de dados e o resultado é mostrado/gravado conforme a consulta feita. / In spite of many works done on query languages, all existing languages are direct extensions of Structured Query Language – SQL and query-By-Example – QBE. These two languages were developed in the beginning of the Relational Database Management Systems – RDBMS development. Althoug these languages are computationally complete, they take the disadvantage of not supporting graphical interaction with data. One of the the main developments in the database area concerns tools to provide users a simple understand of database content, and friendly extraction of the information. The language described in this work enables users to create graphical queries using data flow diagrams. Besides the graphical query language, this work also shows the Data Flow Query Language - DFQL tool. This tool is a query editor/executer that supports this language, using a set of operators represented graphicaly, and the diagram execution is done by analising the network and producing the respective commands in SQL to realize the query. This commands are sent to the DBMS and the result is shown/recorded according to the query.

With rising amount of biological data, biological databases are becoming more important each day. Knowledge discovery (identification of connections that were unknown at the time of data entry) is an essential aspect of these databases. To gain knowledge from these databases one has to construct complicated SQL queries, which requires advanced knowledge of SQL language and used database schema. Biologists usually don't have this knowledge, which creates need for tool, that would offer more intuitive interface for querying biological databases. This work proposes ChQL, an intuitive query language for biological database Chado. ChQL allows biologists to assemble query using terms they are familiar without knowledge of SQL language or Chado database schema. This work implements application for querying Chado database using ChQL. Web interface guides user through process of assembling sentence in ChQL. Application translates this sentence to SQL query, sends it to Chado database and displays returned data in table. Results are evaluated by testing queries on real data.