Periodic Report Summary - DIP3 (The 3Ps of distributed information delivery: Preferences, privacy and performance)
Research work and results
The researcher extended her work on preferences in databases. The focus of this specific scientific work is on preferences in conjunction with keyword-based search in relational databases. Query results are ranked based on both their relevance to the query and their preference degree for the user. Results of this line of research have been published in EDBT 2010. Furthermore, a demo of the implementation of an extension of this research towards extending databases with a recommendation functionality was presented in HDMS 2010.
New research results were attained in the context of database selection for XML document collections in cooperation with students of Prof. C. Pu in Georgia Tech. The focus of this research is on keyword queries with lowest common ancestor (LCA) semantics for defining query results, where the relevance of each document to a query is determined by properties of the LCA of those nodes in the XML document that contain the query keywords. Results of this line of research have been published in WWW 2010.
Two new lines of work with regards to privacy were initiated. The theoretical underpinning related to preferences and privacy preservation in large scale distributed systems was the main focus of both. The first line of work refers to the problem of privacy through data anonymisation in a distributed setting. Details of this line of research have been submitted for publication. The second line of research refers to the problem of enforcing privacy in a topic-based publish/subscribe systems. The main idea is to model the problem using item-set related privacy.
Final results and impact
Privacy and large-scale internet systems are central in the digital economy and areas of potential competitiveness for Europe. Many research labs (most notably Yahoo and Microsoft) are now hosting offices in Europe. In particular privacy has been an important concern in modern society and a major consideration with regards to the widespread use of internet services. The goal of DIP3 is to provide a novel perspective for distributed information delivery by exploiting preferences, respecting privacy and increasing efficiency thus making it suitable for modern large-scale internet systems.
For more information please refer to the project website: http://dmod.cs.uoi.gr/dip3