A single interface for accessing life sciences (LS) data is a natural need to master the data deluge in this domain. The data in the LS requires integration and current integrative solutions increasingly rely on the federation of queries for distributed resources. This paper demonstrates BioFed, a federated SPARQL query processing system customised for LS-LOD. BioFed enables user to formulate a...

In this paper we describe a query paradigm based on ontologies, aggregate table-driven querying and expansion of QBE. It has two novel features: visually specifying aggregate table queries and table layout in a single process, and providing users with an ontology guide in composing complex analysis tasks as queries. We present the role of the fundamental concept of ontology in the context of th...

XML retrieval, also referred to as Structured Document Retrieval is a discipline of information retrieval that focusses on the retrieval of relevant document fragments for a given information need that contains both structural and textual components. In this article we will focus on the theory behind Bricks, a visual query formulation technique for XML retrieval that aims at reducing the comple...

The popularity and ubiquity of multimedia associated with spoken documents has spurred a lot of research interest in spoken document retrieval (SDR) in the recent past. Beyond much effort devoted to developing robust indexing and modeling techniques for representing spoken documents, a recent line of thought targets at the improvement of query modeling for better reflecting the user’s informati...

Information overload has led to a situation where users are swamped with too much information, resulting in difficulty sifting through the material in search of relevant content. In this paper, we address this issue from the perspective of collaboration in query formulation. We describe a search assistant that helps users with query formulation by finding related previously submitted queries th...

One common framework for data integration in practice is federated search. Here an agent queries disjoint sources simultaneously, and then clusters the returned records in the absence of unique keys. However, formulating the correct queries to the sources can be challenging because of the possible query value variations. For instance, some sources may contain a first name as “John” while other ...

The proposed approach to XML query formulation and evaluation developed by means of XML Declarative Description (XDD) theory formalizes a query as an XDD description comprising one or more XML clauses the syntax of which can be subdivided into the three specifications: pattern of XML elements to be selected, the query’s selection criteria and the structure of the resulting elements. It supports...

In this paper we describe the principles of the design and development of an intelligent query interface, done in the context of the SEWASIE (SEmantic Webs and AgentS in Integrated Economies) European IST project. The SEWASIE project aims at enabling a uniform access to heterogeneous data sources through an integrated ontology. The query interface is meant to support a user in formulating a pre...

The use of large amounts of distributed and heterogeneous information has become extremely cumbersome; this difficulty is mainly related to exploring the data, rather than actually storing or exchanging it. The user who is interested in small bits of information is getting more and more confused when having to dig under a large volume of diverse and more importantly semi-structured data. In thi...

Health care and life sciences research heavily relies on the ability to search, discover, formulate and correlate data from distinct sources. Although the Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies help in dealing with data integration problem, there remains a barrier adopting these for non-technical research audiences. In this paper we present FedViz, a visual interface for SPARQL query formula...