A continuing need in the contexts of homeland security, national defense and counterterrorism is for statistical analyses that “integrate” data stored in multiple, distributed databases. There is some belief, for example, that integration of data from flight schools, airlines, credit card issuers, immigration records and other sources might have prevented the terrorist attacks of September 11, ...

In this paper we describe some commonly-required functionality for constructing, visualizing and manipulating ontologies. These make extensive use of XML and DOM technologies. The functions developed are based on practical applications needing access to distributed statistical databases and intelligent content management. They fulfill the needs identified as new features for next generation ont...

Proteins are sources of many peptides with diverse biological activity. Some of them are considered as valuable components of foods and drug targets with desired and designed biological activity. We are now entering an era rich in biological data in which the field of bioinformatics is poised to exploit this information in increasingly powerful ways. There are currently many databases all over ...

Data description or metadata presents a significant database management challenge, particularly for scientific and statistical databases. Ideally, we would llke to access and manipulate data and metadata using the same DBMS tools, but there are few systems that even begin to provide such integrated capabilities. This paper outlines a framework for more integrated metadata management by synthesi...

As computer databases have become more prevalent and comprehensive, they have prompted concerns about the confidentiality of sensitive information. Database administrators require egective policies to guard against disclosure of confidential information while at the same time providing reasonable access to legitimate users. A general method is available for determining if disclosure of sensitiv...

A conceptual data model is a critical key factor to achieve the goal of a database being designed. The requirements of today’s statistical database applications call for powerful modeling techniques. There are a number of data modeling problems that cannot be solved by using existing statistical data models. This paper proposes conceptual data modeling techniques to meet the requirements of a l...

Protection of privacy in databases has become of increasing importance. While a number of techniques have been proposed to query databases while preserving privacy of individual records in the database, very little is done to define a measure on how much privacy is lost after statistical releases. We suggest a definition based on information theory. Intuitively, the privacy loss is proportional...

A statistical database (SDB) is a database that contains sensitive records describing individuals but only statistical information is available. There are many inference control methods proposed to protect SDBs. In this article, we will briefly introduce three general approaches: conception, perturbation, and query restriction approaches. In addition, six criteria are also introduced to evaluat...

We firstly describe an algebraic structure which serves as solid basis to quantitatively reason about information flows. We demonstrate how programs in form of partition of states fit into that theoretical framework. The paper presents a new method and implementation to automatically calculate such partitions, and compares it to existing approaches. As a novel application, we describe a way to ...

Record linkage (e.g., Fellegi and Sunter 1969, Newcombe et al. 1959) involves comparing two or more files on the same population for purposes of unduplication of records and merging files. Record linkage is used in many applications, including population size estimation at the U.S. Census Bureau (Winkler 1994, 1995, and Jaro 1989, 1995), epidemiology and medical studies (Newcombe 1988, Gill 199...