This paper presents the GeoSphereSearch engine for contextaware geographic queries on the Web. It facilitates the formulation of geographic queries and the visual presentation of discrete or aggregated query results in an intuitive manner. In contrast to other approaches it does not assign geographic footprints to documents, but considers context-aware geographic information on the fly, allowin...

XML document retrieval requires new ideas for user interface design. The query language provides primitives for dealing with the tree structure, which needs to be reflected in an interface for query formulation. Further, the XML structure is also reflected in the retrieval results, where items may contain each other. In this paper, we present a user interface for formulating queries in an XPath...

We consider how to support interactive querying over webscale data. The basic approach is to view querying as a two-phase activity: first supply a query template, and later supply specific instantiations of the template. Interactive responsiveness is offered in the second phase only. While instances of this problem have been studied in the past, e.g., OLAP and web search, we pursue a more gener...

Communication and collaboration with other people is a major theme in the information seeking process. Collaborative querying addresses this issue by sharing other users’ search experiences to help users formulate appropriate queries to a search engine. This paper describes a collaborative querying system that helps users with query formulation by finding previously submitted similar queries th...

In this year’s CLEF submissions we focus on using a state-of-the-art statistical machine translation approach for ad-hoc cross-language retrieval. Our machine translation approach is phrase-based as opposed to statistical word-based approaches that have been previously used for query translation in cross-language IR. The phrase translation probabilities were estimated by using the Europarl corp...

Natural language (NL) interfaces for DB query formulation have always been recognized as a much needed enhancement for end-users. Poor performances with earlier NL systems had led to a lull in research in this field. However, latter-day experiments and systems appear to be sufficiently more promising to warrant continued and further research in this area. This study proposes an experimental que...

We present the hybrid query language HQL/EER for an Extended Entity-Relationship model. As its main characteristic, this language allows a user to freely mix graphical and textual formulation of a query. We demonstrate the user-friendliness of this query language by means of examples, and show how syntax and semantics of this language are formally deened using programmed graph rewriting systems...

We present the hybrid query language HQL/EER for an Extended Entity-Relationship model. As its main characteristic, this language allows a user to freely mix graphical and textual formulation of a query. We demonstrate the user-friendliness of this query language by means of examples, and show how syntax and semantics of this language are formally de ned using programmed graph rewriting systems...

Materials with visually important heterogeneous subsurface scattering, including marble, skin, leaves, and minerals, are common in the real world. However, general, accurate and efficient rendering of these materials is an open problem. In this short report, we describe the heterogeneous diffusion equation (DE) formulation that solves this problem. This formulation has two key results: an accur...

In ontology-based data access (OBDA), database querying is enriched with an ontology that provides domain knowledge and additional vocabulary for query formulation. We identify query emptiness and predicate emptiness as two central reasoning services in this context. Query emptiness asks whether a given query has an empty answer over all databases formulated in a given vocabulary. Predicate emp...