[Colloquium] Reminder: today's talk by Vagelis Hristidis

[Margery Ishmael]

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DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

Date: Tuesday, March 9, 2004
Time: 2:30 p.m.
Place: Ryerson 251
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Speaker: VAGELIS HRISTIDIS, University of California, San Diego

Url: http://www.db.ucsd.edu/people/vagelis/

Title: Keyword Search in Structured and Semi-structured Databases

Abstract:

Databases and Information Retrieval (IR) have followed distinct paths,
mainly due to the fact that databases used to store only rigidly
structured data and handle rigidly structured queries, which serve the
purposes of well-designed applications. In contrast, IR is employed for
information discovery and primarily studies how (unstructured) documents
are ranked according to their relevance to an unstructured query
(typically a set of keywords).

However, due to the increasing availability of database data, the
increasing popularity of XML and the increasing amount of text stored in
databases, it has become imperative to allow unstructured queries on
structured and semi-structured databases, in addition to documents. The
most popular type of unstructured query is keyword queries, which
eliminate the requirement of knowing a query language and the structure of
the database, and whose success is proven by Web search engines. The main
focus of this talk is proximity keyword queries, which discover the
associations between keywords in a database
(http://www.db.ucsd.edu/xkeyword/). In addition to that, we briefly
present how link-based ranking techniques (similar to PageRank) can be
applied to improve the quality of single-object results of keyword queries
(http://www.db.ucsd.edu/objectrank/).

Biography:

Vagelis Hristidis is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Computer Science and
Engineering Department at the University of California, San Diego. He is
expected to graduate in July 2004 under the supervision of Yannis
Papakonstantinou, and his area of expertise is Databases. In particular,
his thesis addresses the problem of bridging the gap between Databases
and Information Retrieval, by facilitating keyword-based queries in
structured and semi-structured databases.

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HOST: ANNE ROGERS

*Refreshments will follow the talk in Ryerson 255*

People in need of assistance should call 773-834-8977 in advance.