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Recent Submissions

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    Reachable subwebs for traversal-based query execution
    (University of Waterloo, 2014-02-04) Hartig, Olaf; Ozsu, M. Tamer
    Traversal-based approaches to execute queries over data on the Web have recently been studied. These approaches make use of up-to-date data from initially unknown data sources and, thus, enable applications to tap the full potential of the Web. While existing work focuses primarily on implementation techniques, a principled analysis of subwebs that are reachable by such approaches is missing. Such an analysis may help to gain new insight into the problem of optimizing the response time of traversal-based query engines. Furthermore, a better understanding of characteristics of such subwebs may also inform approaches to benchmark these engines. This report provides such an analysis. In particular, we identify typical graph-based properties of query-specific reachable subwebs and quantify their diversity. Furthermore, we investigate whether vertex scoring methods (e.g., PageRank) are able to predict query-relevance of data sources when applied to such subwebs.
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    Perspectives on open data: Issues and opportunities
    (University of Waterloo, 2014-01-27) Cowan, Donald; Alencdar, Paulo; McGarry, Fred
    Open data like big data has become an important new direction in information technology. Governments are releasing data so as to be more transparent and also claiming that open data has substantial economic value. However, there appear to be many issues about open data that are not being discussed. This paper uses several practical examples in an attempt to illustrate many of these issues and allied opportunities, and through them to suggest a partial research agenda around open data.
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    Big open data for enviroinmental information systems
    (University of Waterloo, 2015-12-04) Cowan, Donald; Alencar, Paulo; McGarry, Fred; Palmer, R. Mark; Boston, Trevor; Rozanski, Rigel
    The frequency of extreme weather events has accelerated, an apparent outcome of progressive climate change. Excess water is a significant consequence of these events and is now the leading cause of insurance claims for infrastructure and property damage. Governments recognize that plans for growth must reflect communities needs, strengths and opportunities while balancing the cumulative effects of economic growth with environmental concerns. For such a process to be effective it will be necessary to develop and operate cumulative effect decision support software (CEDSS) tools, and to work closely with all levels of government including watershed management authorities (WMAs) that supply environmental data. Such co-operation and sharing will require a new open and big data information-sharing platform, which is described in this paper as an open and big data platform for environmental analysis and management.
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    Comparison of affect-control theoretic agents and humans in the prisoner's dilemma
    (University of Waterloo, 2015-11-02) Jung, Joshua D. A.; Hoey, Jesse; Morgan, Jonathan H.; Schroder, Tobias; Wolf, Ingo
    Symbolic interactionist principles of sociology are based on the idea that human action is guided by culturally shared symbolic representations of identities, behaviours, situations and emotions. Shared linguistic, paralinguistic, or kinesic elements allow human to co-ordinate action by enacting identities in social situations. Structures of identity-based interactions can lead to the enactment of social orders that solve social dilemmas (e.g., by promoting co-operation). Our goal is to build an artificial agent that mimics the identity-based interactions of humans, and to compare networks of such agents to human networks. In this paper, we take a first step in this direction, and describe a study in which humans played a repeated prisoner's dilemma game against other humans, or against one of three artificial agents (bots). One of the bots has an explicit representation of identity (for self and other), and attempts to optimise with respect to this representation. We compare the human play against bots to human play against humans, and show how the identity-based bots exhibits the most human-like behaviour.
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    NoSE: Schema design for NoSQL applications
    (University of Waterloo, 2015-10-19) Mior, Michael J.; Salem, Kenneth; Aboulnaga, Ashraf
    Database design is critical for high performance in relational databases and many tools exist to aid application designers in selecting an appropriate schema. While the problem of schema optimization is also highly relevant for NoSQL databases, existing tools for relational databases are inadequate for this setting. Application designers wishing to use a NoSQL database instead rely on rules of thumb to select an appropriate schema. We present a system for recommending database schemas for NoSQL applications. Our cost-based approach uses a novel binary integer programming formulation to guide the mapping from the application's conceptual data model to a database schema. We implemented a prototype of this approach for the Cassandra extensible record store. Our prototype, the NoSQL Schema Evaluator (NoSE) is able to capture rules of thumb used by expert designers without explicitly encoding the rules. Automating the design process allows NoSE to produce efficient schemas and to examine more alternatives than would be possible with a manual rule-based approach.