Motomichi Toyama

SuperSQL: an extended SQL for database publishing and presentation

SuperSQL is an extension of SQL that allows query results presented in various media for publishing and presentations with simple but sophisticated formatting capabilities. SuperSQL query can generate various kinds of materials, for example, a LaTeX source file to publish query results in a nested table, HTML or Java source files to present the result on WWW browsers, and other media including MS-Excel worksheet, Tcl/Tk, O2C, etc. O2C is a data manipulation language of O2 and thus useful to migrate data in a relational database to an object oriented database. SuperSQL is meant to provide a theoretical and practical foundation for 4GL-type applications such as report writers and DB/WWW coordinators. In this demonstration, we show how TFE reorganize the query results into various media in a universal way, first by grouping tuples according to an arbitrary tree structured schema, and by translating them with the constructors available in the target media.

Generating HTML sources with TFE enhanced SQL

An extension for SQL is proposed. The generalization of its target list, called TFE is introduced to generate HTML documents directly as a result of a query. The distinctive feature not found in similar tools in the market, is the automatic generation of multiple pages and the hyperlinks among them. A broad range of applications categorized as Intranet or Electronic Commerce will be benefited from this research by its simplicity and the versatility.

Dynamic and Structured Presentation of Database Contents on the Web

Attractive presentation of database contents is a key component of Web-based businesses. TFE (Target Form Expression) is a database publishing/presentation extension of SQL that yields a query result presented as a document in any of several target media, for example, HTML, Java, LaTeX. When a Web (HTML) document is the target medium, TFE yields intra-page and inter-page hierarchical structures in arbitrary size and complexity. The inter-page structures are automatically-generated hyper-links which allow the resulting Web document to be browsed in a fashion similar to drill down in a data warehouse. In this paper, we introduce a new primitive of TFE that allows the invocation of another query. Combined with the incremental evaluation of invoked queries, it improves both efficiency and functionality compared to monolithic and static implementations. The improved functionality includes recursive navigation. A small number of query rewriting rules are provided to show the equivalence of a query and its decompositions. Incremental query evaluation gives application system an enhanced capability for designing database/Web applications to meet performance and functionality requirements while retaining simplicity of description. A new diagramming method called Database Presentation Diagram is also introduced to visualize the structures of a set of queries and the presentation produced with them.

Parameterized view definition and recursive relations

The concept of parameterized view definition mechanism for relational database systems is presented. Primarily, it makes a single view definition serving for several different view instances according to the supplied actual parameters. Dynamic binding of parameters for the view allows the definition of recursive relations, such as transitive closure, without using extended operators or procedural constructs such as loops. In this paper, upward compatible syntax for SQL that incorporates view parameterization is proposed.

Automatic vs. Crowdsourced Sentiment Analysis

Due to the amount of work needed in manual sentiment analysis of written texts, techniques in automatic sentiment analysis have been widely studied. However, compared to manual sentiment analysis, the accuracy of automatic systems range only from low to medium. In this study, we solve a sentiment analysis problem by crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is a problem solving approach that uses the cognitive power of people to achieve specific computational goals. It is implemented through an online platform, which can either be paid or volunteer-based. We deploy crowdsourcing applications in paid and volunteer-based platforms to classify teaching evaluation comments from students. We present a comparison of the results produced by crowdsourcing, manual sentiment analysis, and an existing automatic sentiment analysis system. Our findings show that the crowdsourced sentiment analysis in both paid and volunteer-based platforms are considerably more accurate than the automatic sentiment analysis algorithm but still fail to achieve high accuracy compared to the manual method. To improve accuracy, the effect of increasing the size of the crowd could be explored in the future.

Ducky: a data extraction system for various structured web documents

The World Wide Web has become a primary source of information. Therefore, extracting data from Web sources has become a key technology. In this paper, we introduce a semi-automatic system Ducky: including a Web Wrapper which extracts data from Web sources and translates them into structured data. In Ducky, by defining a configuration file consisting in several parameters (URL of the Web page, CSS selectors which locates the data to retrieve and so on.), users do not need to write Web scraping programs at all. The definition is simple, yet can extract data flexibly from various structured Web pages. Additionally, Ducky provides a Web API and various output data formats: XML, JSON, CSV. Finally, experimentations confirmed that Ducky can accurately extract data from 22 different structured Web sources.

An investigation of unpaid crowdsourcing

The continual advancement of internet technologies has led to the evolution of how individuals and organizations operate. For example, through the internet, we can now tap a remote workforce to help us accomplish certain tasks, a phenomenon called crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is an approach that relies on people to perform activities that are costly or time-consuming using traditional methods. Depending on the incentive given to the crowd workers, crowdsourcing can be classified as paid or unpaid. In paid crowdsourcing, the workers are incentivized financially, enabling the formation of a robust workforce, which allows fast completion of tasks. Consequently, in unpaid crowdsourcing, the lack of financial incentive potentially leads to an unpredictable workforce and indeterminable task completion time. However, since payment to workers is not necessary, it can be an economical alternative for individuals and organizations who are more concerned about the budget than the task turnaround time. In this study, we explore unpaid crowdsourcing by reviewing crowdsourcing applications where the crowd comes from a pool of volunteers. We also evaluate its performance in sentiment analysis and data extraction projects. Our findings suggest that for such tasks, unpaid crowdsourcing completes slower but yields results of similar or higher quality compared to its paid counterpart.

Hash-based symmetric data structure and join algorithm for OLAP applications

The star schema is often used in dimensional approaches applied to OLAP applications. The fact table in the star schema typically contains a huge amount of data. When some of the dimension tables are also very large, it may take too much time and storage to join the fact table with these dimension tables. The performance of the join algorithm becomes critical under such a condition. The fluent join is a join algorithm that operates on relations organized as multidimensional linear hash files. Like a merge join on relations which are already sorted on the joining key, its execution reads each page in the operand relations no more than once and does not create intermediate result files. Unlike sorting, the multi-dimensional linear hash can cluster records in several keys symmetrically. In this paper, the concept of the fluent join is applied to an OLAP system to cluster records in each table on the joining keys. As a result, the algorithm yields symmetric performances on joins with different dimension tables.

Towards a Gamified Equivalent Mutants Detection Platform

This poster presents a gamified system for equivalent mutants detection. This system can be used as a standalone tool for developers and testing teams alike - but we plan to use this system on a crowdsourcing platform to evaluate the various parameters involved in the detection of equivalent mutants, such as, expertise (coding and testing), familiarity with the code base, complexity of the code and tests, measured likelihood of equivalent mutants.

GENERATE eHTML: Embedding SuperSQL Queries in HTML

SuperSQL is a database publishing/presentation extension of SQL that can generate various kinds of structured documents that contain values stored in RDBs. Thanks to a useful tools, it is becomes easily to creating web application. However, users need a lot of knowledge about various programing languages such as HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, and so on to create Web applications. In this article, we propose a method to directly embed SuperSQL queries in a HTML file to facilitate the development of web applications.