[Colloq] **COLLOQUIUM** Thursday, May 16, 3:00pm 149CN

[Rachel Bates]

College of Computer Science Colloquium

presents:
David Toman

who will speak on:
Fine Grained Information Integration with Description Logics

Thursday, May 16, 2002
3:00pm
149 Cullinane Hall


Abstract:

An embedded control program can be viewed as a small main-memory database
system tailored to suit the needs of a particular application.  For
performance reasons, the program will usually define concrete low level data
structures to encode the database, which in turn must be understood by
anyone who needs to develop or modify the program.  This is in contrast with
the data independence that can be achieved by using a database system.
However, because of space and performance requirements, the use of current
database technology is not likely to be feasible in this setting.

The talk outlines an approach to query compilation and optimization in which
a description logic (DL) reasoner serves a crucial strategic role, and
present an example application of the approach in fine grained information
integration of main-memory data.  Of crucial significance is that an
arbitrary collection of such structures, perhaps already devised for an
earlier version of the control program, can be given as a part of the input
to the optimizer.  The query optimizer algorithms are based on a novel
resource bounded plan generation mechanism in which integrity constraints
are applied to source queries to extend the search space of possible query
plans. We also report on some preliminary experimental results that suggest
generated code navigates concrete data structures with an efficiency
comparable to code written directly by expert programmers.

Host:  Betty Salzberg