The SEWASIE (SEmantic Webs and AgentS in Integrated Economies) project aims at enabling a uniform access to heterogeneous data sources through an integrated ontology. The overall project development strictly follows a user-centred design methodology. Users have been involved from the very beginning and are constantly participating in the design and testing of the system, in order to obtain a fi...

Medical information retrieval systems support health care experts in diagnostic and treatment decisions through the management of large amounts of clinical data. However, the ever growing data produced in medical environments and the proficiency of non-professional users pose several challenges to a retrieval system. In this paper, we propose a medical retrieval system, supporting semantic mult...

Biologists increasingly need to ask complex questions over the large number of data and analysis tools that are available on the Internet. To do this, the individual resources need to be made to work together. The knowledge needed to accomplish this, for example about the locations of the sources and their capabilities, places barriers between biologists and the questions they would like to ask...

1047-3203/$ see front matter 2008 Elsevier Inc. A doi:10.1016/j.jvcir.2008.12.001 q This work is supported by the National Natural under the Grant Nos. 60621062 and 60605003, the N Projects under the Grant Nos. 2003CB317007, 2004C and the Basic Research Foundation of Tsinghua Nation Science and Technology (TNList). * Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (D. Wang). 1 Work perf...

To most medical researchers, databases are obscure black boxes. Query analysts are often indispensable guides aiding researchers to perform mediated data queries. However, this approach does not scale up and is time-consuming and expensive. We analyzed query mediation dialogues to inform future designs of intelligent query mediation systems. Thirty-one mediated query sessions for 22 research pr...

This paper documents a pilot study conducted as part of the development of a new corpus processing system at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim and in the context of the ISO TC37 SC4/WG6 activity on the suggested work item proposal “Corpus Query Lingua Franca”. We describe the first phase of our research: the initial formulation of functionality criteria for query language evaluation...

This study investigates how expert intermediaries interact with a corporate digital library when searching specialised topics. We identify query reformulation as being key to successful search and therefore present a more detailed account of this stage of an information seeking process. We propose that query reformulation forms a significant, distinct step from initial query formulation or subs...

This chapter introduces a complete storage and retrieval architecture for a database environment for XML documents. DocBase, a prototype system based on this architecture, uses a flexible storage and indexing technique to allow highly expressive queries without the necessity of mapping documents to other database formats. DocBase is an integration of several techniques that include (i) a formal...

This paper presents the main features of a Multimedia Query Language tailored for content-based similarity retrieval of multimedia objects. The Query Language processor is a component of a multimedia database system that adopts a model that permits both a structural representation of raw multimedia data and an automatically computed description of the multimedia data content. The Query Language...

In this paper, we propose a concept for using combined multimodal queries in the context of digital music libraries. Whereas usual mechanisms for content-based music retrieval only consider a single query mode, such as query-by-humming, full-text lyrics-search or query-by-example using short audio snippets, our proposed concept allows to combine those different modalities into one integrated qu...