Richard Chbeir

User Profile Matching in Social Networks

Inter-social networks operations and functionalities are required in several scenarios (data integration, data enrichment, information retrieval, etc.). To achieve this, matching user profiles is required. Current methods are so restrictive and do not consider all the related problems. Particularly, they assume that two profiles describe the same physical person only if the values of their Inverse Functional Property or IFP (e.g. the email address, homepage, etc.) are the same. However, the observed trend in social networks is not fully compatible with this assumption since users tend to create more than one social network account (for personal use, for work, etc.) while using same or different email addresses. In this work, we address the problem of matching user profiles in its globality by providing a suitable matching framework able to consider all the profile’s attributes. Our framework allows users to give more importance to some attributes and assign each attribute a different similarity measure. The set of experiments conducted with our default/recommended attribute/similarity measures shows the superiority of our proposal in comparison with current ones.

Survey: An overview on XML similarity: Background, current trends and future directions

In recent years, XML has been established as a major means for information management, and has been broadly utilized for complex data representation (e.g. multimedia objects). Owing to an unparalleled increasing use of the XML standard, developing efficient techniques for comparing XML-based documents becomes essential in the database and information retrieval communities. In this paper, we provide an overview of XML similarity/comparison by presenting existing research related to XML similarity. We also detail the possible applications of XML comparison processes in various fields, ranging over data warehousing, data integration, classification/clustering and XML querying, and discuss some required and emergent future research directions.

SOAP Processing Performance and Enhancement

The web services (WS) technology provides a comprehensive solution for representing, discovering, and invoking services in a wide variety of environments, including Service Oriented Architectures (SOA ) and grid computing systems. At the core of WS technology lie a number of XML-based standards, such as the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), that have successfully ensured WS extensibility, transparency, and interoperability. Nonetheless, there is an increasing demand to enhance WS performance, which is severely impaired by XMLs verbosity. SOAP communications produce considerable network traffic, making them unfit for distributed, loosely coupled, and heterogeneous computing environments such as the open Internet. Also, they introduce higher latency and processing delays than other technologies, like Java RMI and CORBA. WS research has recently focused on SOAP performance enhancement. Many approaches build on the observation that SOAP message exchange usually involves highly similar messages (those created by the same implementation usually have the same structure, and those sent from a server to multiple clients tend to show similarities in structure and content). Similarity evaluation and differential encoding have thus emerged as SOAP performance enhancement techniques. The main idea is to identify the common parts of SOAP messages, to be processed only once, avoiding a large amount of overhead. Other approaches investigate nontraditional processor architectures, including micro- and macrolevel parallel processing solutions, so as to further increase the processing rates of SOAP/XML software toolkits. This survey paper provides a concise, yet comprehensive review of the research efforts aimed at SOAP performance enhancement. A unified view of the problem is provided, covering almost every phase of SOAP processing, ranging over message parsing, serialization, deserialization, compression, multicasting, security evaluation, and data/instruction-level processing.

A novel XML document structure comparison framework based-on sub-tree commonalities and label semantics

XML similarity evaluation has become a central issue in the database and information communities, its applications ranging over document clustering, version control, data integration and ranked retrieval. Various algorithms for comparing hierarchically structured data, XML documents in particular, have been proposed in the literature. Most of them make use of techniques for finding the edit distance between tree structures, XML documents being commonly modeled as Ordered Labeled Trees. Yet, a thorough investigation of current approaches led us to identify several similarity aspects, i.e., sub-tree related structural and semantic similarities, which are not sufficiently addressed while comparing XML documents. In this paper, we provide an integrated and fine-grained comparison framework to deal with both structural and semantic similarities in XML documents (detecting the occurrences and repetitions of structurally and semantically similar sub-trees), and to allow the end-user to adjust the comparison process according to her requirements. Our framework consists of four main modules for (i) discovering the structural commonalities between sub-trees, (ii) identifying sub-tree semantic resemblances, (iii) computing tree-based edit operations costs, and (iv) computing tree edit distance. Experimental results demonstrate higher comparison accuracy with respect to alternative methods, while timing experiments reflect the impact of semantic similarity on overall system performance.

Relating RSS News/Items

Merging related RSS news (coming from one or different sources) is beneficial for end-users with different backgrounds (journalists, economists, etc.), particularly those accessing similar information. In this paper, we provide a practical approach to both: measure the relatedness, and identify relationships between RSS elements. Our approach is based on the concepts of semantic neighborhood and vector space model, and considers the content and structure of RSS news items.

Semantic-based Merging of RSS Items

Merging XML documents can be of key importance in several applications. For instance, merging the RSS news from same or different sources and providers can be beneficial for end-users in various scenarios. In this paper, we address this issue and explore the relatedness measure between RSS elements. We show here how to define and compute exclusive relations between any two elements and provide several predefined merging operators that can be extended and adapted to human needs. We also provide a set of experiments conducted to validate our approach.

A New Time Series Mining Approach Applied to Multitemporal Remote Sensing Imagery

In this paper, we present a novel unsupervised algorithm, called CLimate and rEmote sensing Association patteRns Miner, for mining association patterns on heterogeneous time series from climate and remote sensing data integrated in a remote sensing information system developed to improve the monitoring of sugar cane fields. The system, called RemoteAgri, consists of a large database of climate data and low-resolution remote sensing images, an image preprocessing module, a time series extraction module, and time series mining methods. The preprocessing module was projected to perform accurate geometric correction, what is a requirement particularly for land and agriculture applications of satellite images. The time series extraction is accomplished through a graphical interface that allows easy interaction and high flexibility to users. The time series mining method transforms series to symbolic representation in order to identify patterns in a multitemporal satellite images and associate them with patterns in other series within a temporal sliding window. The validation process was achieved with agroclimatic data and NOAA-AVHRR images of sugar cane fields. Results show a correlation between agroclimatic time series and vegetation index images. Rules generated by our new algorithm show the association patterns in different periods of time in each time series, pointing to a time delay between the occurrences of patterns in the series analyzed, corroborating what specialists usually forecast without having the burden of dealing with many data charts.

HON-P2P: a cluster-based hybrid overlay network for multimedia object management

Multimedia centric P2P must take into consideration the main characteristics and the complex relationships among multimedia objects. In this paper, we propose a cluster-based hybrid overlay network HON-P2P for sharing multimedia content. It consists in clustering peers with similar feature based or semantic properties. We define two types of clustering methods corresponding to the semantic and feature based overlays: semantic clustering and feature based clustering. To improve the information retrieval in the HON-P2P network we propose a multimedia cache management methodology. Semantic multimedia cache and feature based multimedia cache are defined for each type of overlay. Moreover, we study the cache placement possibilities inside the cluster and we propose a cache distribution technique taking into account peers capabilities and range query.

Content and Structure Based Approach For XML Similarity

Since the last decade, XML has become inevitable for complex data representation. In this paper, we address a problem of measuring the similarity between XML documents and propose a new XML document similarity approach, which considers the asymmetric similarity and the similarity of both semantic content and document structure. Here, we only consider the measurement of similarity between two XML documents based on the same schema. A prototype has been implemented to validate and evaluate the performances of our proposal. We do believe that our method can also be used to evaluate the similarity of other tree-structured complex data

Discovering relationship types between users using profiles and shared photos in a social network

In this paper, we propose a new approach to discover the relationship types between a user and her contacts in a social network. This is of key importance for many applications in the domain of photo sharing, privacy protection, information enriching, etc. Our approach is based, on one hand, on information extracted from users’ profiles and their shared photos, and, on the other hand, on a set of predefined rules validated by the main user before being mined and derived according to her preferences and social network content. The contribution of our method is twofold: 1) it is user-based enabling the user to set her preferences and give her feedbacks on the derived rules and results, and 2) it is multi-criteria that exploits and combines several attributes and features from user profiles and shared photos respectively. It also allows the user to define new relationship types. We conducted a set of experiments to validate our approach. The obtained results show the accuracy of our approach in different scenarios.