A User-centric Annotation Framework for Scientific Data

Qinglan Li (CS Grad/Pitt)

PhD Proposal Defense

Monday March 31, 2008
1:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.
SENSQ 6106 - Eli Lilly Room

Abstract

Annotations play an increasingly crucial role in scientific exploration and discovery, as the amount of data and the level of collaboration among scientists’ increases. There are many systems today focusing on annotation propagation and annotation management. Although all such systems are implemented to take user input (i.e., the annotations themselves), very few systems are user-centric, taking into account user preferences on how annotations should be propagated and be applied over data. In this thesis, we propose to treat annotations as first-class citizens for scientific data management by introducing a user-centric, view-based annotation framework. Under this framework, we try to resolve two critical questions. (1) How do we support user-centric time semantics for annotation? (2) How do we support propagation of annotations in user-defined ways?

To address above challenges, we propose to use VIew-base annotation Propagation (ViP) to empower users to express their preferences over the time semantics of annotations (by supporting future annotations) and over the network semantics of annotations (by supporting both implicitly-defined and explicitly-defined annotation propagation paths). To efficiently support such novel functionality, ViP utilizes database views and introduces new caching techniques. Through an extensive experimental study on a real system, we show that the ViP framework can seemly introduce user-centric annotation propagation semantics while at the same time significantly improving the performance over the current state of the art.

Dissertation CO-AdviserS

Dr. Alexandros Labrinidis, Department of Computer Science
Dr. Panos K. Chrysanthis, Department of Computer Science

Committee Members

Dr. Ahmed Amer
Dr. G. Elisabeta Marai
Dr. Christos Faloutsos (Carnegie Mellon University)