The continuous evolution of the Web has made itself the primary knowledge source for many people. It has become an information repository full of entities (material or virtual) and descriptions of their properties and relationships. In discovering and exploring the entities that fascinate them, the users are in need of structured querying facilities, coupled with text retrieval capabilities, that explicitly deal with the entities, their properties, and relationships.
In this project, the PIs investigate a novel declarative query mechanism, entity-relationship queries (ERQ), for users to discover and explore the rich structured and entity-centric information on the Web. The research objective is to produce general methods for efficient processing and optimization of entity-relationship queries and automatic ranking of query results, and to systematically develop a query engine for such queries. The methodology is to exploit the evidence of the co-occurrence of entities and keyword constraints, through the integration of DB and IR methods. A systematic approach will be taken to produce automatic ranking function formulation method, efficient entity-centric index and index selection methods, and top-k query processing algorithms.
The research results will have broader impacts on the higher education system, high-tech industries, the scientific community, and the general public. The educational goal of the project is to be achieved by integrating research and educational efforts through these activities: broadening database curriculum; involving under-represented students and undergraduates in research; outreach; and publicly releasing the online demo, software, datasets, publications, and course materials.
For further information see the project web page: URL: http://idir.uta.edu/erq
