https://people.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~kberberi/publications/2010-mpii-tra.pdf

YAGO2: A spatially and temporally enhanced knowledge base from Wikipedia

SPARQL is the standard language for querying RDF data. In this article, we address systematically the formal study of the database aspects of SPARQL, concentrating in its graph pattern matching facility. We provide a compositional semantics for the core part of SPARQL, and study the complexity of the evaluation of several fragments of the language. Among other complexity results, we show that the evaluation of general SPARQL patterns is PSPACE-complete. We identify a large class of SPARQL patterns, defined by imposing a simple and natural syntactic restriction, where the query evaluation problem can be solved more efficiently. This restriction gives rise to the class of well-designed patterns. We show that the evaluation problem is coNP-complete for well-designed patterns. Moreover, we provide several rewriting rules for well-designed patterns whose application may have a considerable impact in the cost of evaluating SPARQL queries.

/pdf/semantics-and-complexity-of-sparql-1jy733raed.pdf

Semantics and complexity of SPARQL

Search engine click logs provide an invaluable source of relevance information, but this information is biased. A key source of bias is presentation order: the probability of click is influenced by a document's position in the results page. This paper focuses on explaining that bias, modelling how probability of click depends on position. We propose four simple hypotheses about how position bias might arise. We carry out a large data-gathering effort, where we perturb the ranking of a major search engine, to see how clicks are affected. We then explore which of the four hypotheses best explains the real-world position effects, and compare these to a simple logistic regression model. The data are not well explained by simple position models, where some users click indiscriminately on rank 1 or there is a simple decay of attention over ranks. A 'cascade' model, where users view results from top to bottom and leave as soon as they see a worthwhile document, is our best explanation for position bias in early ranks

An experimental comparison of click position-bias models

We present a method for accurately predicting the long time popularity of online content from early measurements of user’s access. Using two content sharing portals, Youtube and Digg, we show that by modeling the accrual of views and votes on content offered by these services we can predict the long-term dynamics of individual submissions from initial data. In the case of Digg, measuring access to given stories during the first two hours allows us to forecast their popularity 30 days ahead with remarkable accuracy, while downloads of Youtube videos need to be followed for 10 days to attain the same performance. The differing time scales of the predictions are shown to be due to differences in how content is consumed on the two portals: Digg stories quickly become outdated, while Youtube videos are still found long after they are initially submitted to the portal. We show that predictions are more accurate for submissions for which attention decays quickly, whereas predictions for evergreen content will be prone to larger errors.

Predicting the popularity of online content

We present a method for accurately predicting the long time popularity of online content from early measurements of user access. Using two content sharing portals, Youtube and Digg, we show that by modeling the accrual of views and votes on content offered by these services we can predict the long-term dynamics of individual submissions from initial data. In the case of Digg, measuring access to given stories during the first two hours allows us to forecast their popularity 30 days ahead with remarkable accuracy, while downloads of Youtube videos need to be followed for 10 days to attain the same performance. The differing time scales of the predictions are shown to be due to differences in how content is consumed on the two portals: Digg stories quickly become outdated, while Youtube videos are still found long after they are initially submitted to the portal. We show that predictions are more accurate for submissions for which attention decays quickly, whereas predictions for evergreen content will be prone to larger errors.

In this paper we propose a method that, given a query submitted to a search engine, suggests a list of related queries The related queries are based in previously issued queries, and can be issued by the user to the search engine to tune or redirect the search process The method proposed is based on a query clustering process in which groups of semantically similar queries are identified The clustering process uses the content of historical preferences of users registered in the query log of the search engine The method not only discovers the related queries, but also ranks them according to a relevance criterion Finally, we show with experiments over the query log of a search engine the effectiveness of the method.

Query recommendation using query logs in search engines

The Semantic Web is based on the idea of adding more machine-readable semantics to web information via annotations written in a language called the Resource Description Framework (RDF). RDF resembles a subset of binary first-order logic including the ability to refer to anonymous objects. Its extended version, RDFS, supports reification, typing and inheritance. These features introduce new challenges into the formal study of sets of RDF/RDFS statements and languages for querying them. Although several such query languages have been proposed, there has been little work on foundational aspects. We investigate these, including computational aspects of testing entailment and redundancy. We propose a query language with well-defined semantics and study the complexity of query processing, query containment, and simplification of answers.

/pdf/foundations-of-semantic-web-databases-smt8q9xv2w.pdf

Foundations of semantic web databases

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a metadata model and language recommended by the W3C. This paper presents a framework to incorporate temporal reasoning into RDF, yielding temporal RDF graphs. We present a semantics for temporal RDF graphs, a syntax to incorporate temporality into standard RDF graphs, an inference system for temporal RDF graphs, complexity bounds showing that entailment in temporal RDF graphs does not yield extra asymptotic complexity with respect to standard RDF graphs and sketch a temporal query language for RDF.

Temporal RDF

In multidimensional data models intended for online analytic processing (OLAP), data are viewed as points in a multidimensional space. Each dimension has structure, described by a directed graph of categories, a set of members for each category, and a child/parent relation between members. An important application of this structure is to use it to infer summarizability, that is, whether an aggregate view defined for some category can be correctly derived from a set of precomputed views defined for other categories. A dimension is called structurally heterogeneous if two members in a given category are allowed to have ancestors in different categories. In this article, we propose a class of integrity constraints, dimension constraints, that allow us to reason about summarizability in heterogeneous dimensions. We introduce the notion of frozen dimensions which are minimal homogeneous dimension instances representing the different structures that are implicitly combined in a heterogeneous dimension. Frozen dimensions provide the basis for efficiently testing the implication of dimension constraints and are a useful aid to understanding heterogeneous dimensions. We give a sound and complete algorithm for solving the implication of dimension constraints that uses heuristics based on the structure of the dimension and the constraints to speed up its execution. We study the intrinsic complexity of the implication problem and the running time of our algorithm.

/pdf/capturing-summarizability-with-integrity-constraints-in-olap-omsv08nccu.pdf

Capturing summarizability with integrity constraints in OLAP

We explore flexible querying of RDF data, with the aim of making it possible to return data satisfying query conditions with varying degrees of exactness, and also to rank the results of a query depending on how "closely" they satisfy the query conditions. We make queries more flexible by logical relaxation of their conditions based on RDFS entailment and RDFS ontologies. We develop a notion of ranking of query answers, and present a query processing algorithm for incrementally computing the relaxed answer of a query. Our approach has application in scenarios where there is a lack of understanding of the ontology underlying the data, or where the data objects have heterogeneous sets of properties or irregular structures.

Carlos Hurtado

Papers

Query recommendation using query logs in search engines

Foundations of semantic web databases

Temporal RDF

Capturing summarizability with integrity constraints in OLAP

Query relaxation in RDF