UCSD Database Group Makes Strong Showing at the ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2006 Conference

The work of UCSD's Database Lab was very well received at this year's edition of  the ACM SIGMOD/PODS conference.
DB Lab members published a record 7 papers, one of which was awarded an Honorable Mention as top-3 finalist in the
SIGMOD Best Paper Award competition:

    Michalis Petropoulos, Alin Deutsch, Yannis Papakonstantinou:
    Interactive query formulation over web service-accessed sources.
    SIGMOD 2006
    This work is part of the DB group's broader research on tools that facilitate the task of data integration on the Web.

The paper addresses a serious problem faced nowadays by developers of applications that try to access data from autonomous information sources available on the Web. Such information sources typically do not support all possible queries against their data due to commercial, privacy, or efficiency reasons. For instance, Amazon.com allows applications to retrieve all corresponding titles given an author name, but rejects queries which list the entire book catalog. The prevalent mechanism used for supporting only a restricted set of queries is to package them as Web services. Past works have shown how integration software can automatically find ways to answer feasible queries, i.e., queries that can be answered by combining and filtering the results of multiple service calls. The problem is that developers of integration applications need to formulate feasible queries; infeasible queries were previously rejected without any explanatory feedback, trapping developers in a frustrating trial-and-error cycle.

The paper solves this problem by introducing the CLient guIDE (CLIDE) visual interface which guides the developer toward formulating feasible queries. During the interaction with the developer, the interface uses a color scheme to suggest at each step how the query under construction can be edited to eventually yield a feasible query. The interface is designed to enable an optimal interaction with the developer in a precise sense which is formalized based on the following principles: CLIDE guarantees that the suggested query edit actions are

     a. complete  (i.e. each feasible query can be built by following only suggestions),
     b. rapidly convergent (the suggestions are tuned to lead to the closest feasible completions of the query) and
     c. suitably summarized (at each interaction step, only a minimal number of actions needed to preserve completeness are suggested).


The other SIGMOD/PODS 2006 papers (co-)authored by UCSD DB Lab members are listed below.

Full research papers

    Nicola Onose, Alin Deutsch, Yannis Papakonstantinou, Emiran Curtmola:
    Rewriting nested XML queries using nested views.
    SIGMOD 2006

    Sihem Amer-Yahia, Emiran Curtmola, Alin Deutsch:
    Flexible and efficient XML search with complex full-text predicates.
    SIGMOD 2006

    Georg Gottlob, Alan Nash:
    Data exchange: computing cores in polynomial time.
    PODS 2006

    Alin Deutsch, Liying Sui, Victor Vianu, Dayou Zhou:
    Verification of communicating data-driven web services.
    PODS 2006


System demonstration papers

    Heasoo Hwang, Vagelis Hristidis, Yannis Papakonstantinou:
    ObjectRank: a system for authority-based search on databases.
    SIGMOD 2006

    Alin Deutsch, Liying Sui, Victor Vianu, Dayou Zhou:
    A system for specification and verification of interactive, data-driven web applications.
    SIGMOD 2006