Yael Amsterdamer, Department of Computer Science Bar Ilan University
Provenance-Based SPARQL Query Formulation
Abstract We present in this paper a novel solution for assisting users in formulating SPARQL queries. The high-level idea is that users write “semi-formal SPARQL queries”, namely, queries whose structure resembles SPARQL but are not necessarily grounded to the schema of the underlying Knowledge Base (KB) and require only basic familiarity with SPARQL. This means that the user-intended query over the KB may differ from the specified semi-formal query in its structure and query elements. We design a novel framework that systematically and gradually refines the query to obtain candidate formal queries that do match the KB. Crucially, we introduce a formal notion of provenance tracking this query refinement process, and use the tracked provenance to prompt the user for fine-grained feedback on parts of the candidate query, guiding our search. Experiments on a diverse query workload with respect to both DBpedia and YAGO show the usefulness of our approach.
Short Bio: Yael Amsterdamer is a Senior Lecturer at the Department ofComputer Science, Bar-Ilan University (Ramat-Gan, Israel), and the head of the Data Management Lab. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Tel-Aviv University, and has been a visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA and jointly at Télécom Paris and INRIA institute (Paris, France). Her research is in the field of data management spanning topics such as crowd-powered data management, provenance and interactive summarization. She has won competitive grants such as the Israeli Science Foundation and Ministry of Science and regularly serves in program committees of top conferences.