As the final outcome of our work in the context of the Wisdom project, a prototype for query formulation has been developed in order to prove the validity of the M-FIRE framework [3, 5, 4], and the feasibility of our approach to knowledge representation and exploration. The prototype includes a client module (written in C#) and a server module (written in Java) which communicate through a state...

For developing advanced query formulation methods for general multimedia data, we describe the issues related to video data. We distinguish between the requirements for image retrieval and video retrieval by identifying queryable attributes unique to video data, namely audio, temporal structure, motion, and events. Our approach is based on visual query methods to describe predicates interactive...

Given a set of keyphrases, we analyze how Web queries with these phrases can be formed that, taken altogether, return a specified number of hits. The use case of this problem is a plagiarism detection system that searches the Web for potentially plagiarized passages in a given suspicious document. For the query formulation problem we develop a heuristic search strategy based on cooccurrence pro...

In this paper, we address the problem of efficient processing of XQueries in single-user relational environment where the queries are formulated using a user-friendly GUI. We take a novel and non-traditional approach to improving query performance by prefetching data during the formulation of a query. The latency offered by GUI-based query formulation is utilized to prefetch portions of the que...

To find information on the World-Wide Web (WWW), two approaches are generally followed. Browsing the web from a specific starting point, or web-site map, is called search by divergence. The second approach, search by convergence, is followed when using a search engine. Most search engines use a information retrieval strategy, which requires that the user supplies some keywords to find the relev...

Effective information disclosure in the context of databases with a large conceptual schema is known to be a non-trivial problem. In particular the formulation of ad-hoc queries is a major problem in such contexts. Existing approaches for tackling this problem include graphical query interfaces, query by navigation, query by construction, and point to point queries. In this article we propose t...