Research Issues in Data Warehousing
Data warehousing is a booming industry with many interesting research problems. The database research community has concentrated on only a few aspects. In this paper, We summarize the state of the art, suggest architectural extensions and identify research problems in the areas of warehouse modeling and design, data cleansing and loading, data refreshing and purging, metadata management, extensions to relational operators, alternative implementations of traditional relational operators, special index structures and query optimization with aggregates.

title: A Hyperrelational Approach to Integration and Manipulation of Data in Multidatabase Systems
abstract: The issue of interoperability among multiple autonomous databases has attracted a lot of attention from researchers in these years. The past research on this issue can be roughly divided into two main categories: the tightly-integrated approach that integrate databases by building an integrated schema and the loosely-integrated approach that achieves interoperability by using a multidatabase language. Most of the past efforts focused on the issues in the first approach. The problem with the first approach is, however, that it lacks a convenient representation of the integrated schema at the system level and a sound mathematical basis for data manipulation in a multidatabase system. In this paper, we propose to use hyperrelations as a powerful and succinct model for the global level representation of heterogeneous database schemas. A hyperrelation has the structure of a relation, but its contents are the schemas of the semantically equivalent local relations in the databases. With this representation, the metadata of the global database, local databases and the data of these databases are all representable by using the structure of a relation. The impact of such a representation is that all the elegant features of relational systems can be easily extended to multidatabase systems. A hyperrelational algebra is designed accordingly. This algebra is performed at the multidatabase systems (MDBS) level such that query transformation and optimization is supported on a sound mathematical basis. The major contributions of this paper include: (1) Local relations of various schemas (even though they retain information of the same semantics) can be systematically mapped to hyperrelations. As the structure of a hyperrelation is similar to that of a relation, data manipulation and management tasks (such as design of the global query language and the view mechanism) are greatly facilitated. (2) The hyperrelational algebra provides a sound basis for query transformation and optimization in a MDBS.

title: Supporting Group-By and Pipelining in Bitmap-Enabled Query Processors
abstract: The Group-By operation is widely used in relational Data Warehouses for the aggregation and presentation of results according to user-defined criteria. Rearranging Group-By and join operations has been proposed as an optimization technique that reduces the size of the input relation. Pipelining is another optimization technique that promotes intra-query parallelism by transfering intermediate results to the next operation without materializing them. In Data Warehouses and environments in which exploratory on-line queries are common, pipelining can be used both for optimizing joins and for the reduction of response time by presenting partial results to the user. Efficient pipelining often depends on the order of the intermediate results. Order-dependent operations, such as Group-By, typically require the complete result set before ordering it, thereby making efficient pipelining impossible. In this paper we exploit bitmap indexing to implement Group-By in a manner that can be used for pipelining. Algorithms are presented for different assumptions about buffer availability and for different sort orders.

title: Query optimization for selections using bitmaps
abstract: Bitmaps are popular indexes for data warehouse (DW) applications and most database management systems offer them today. This paper proposes query optimization strategies for selections using bitmaps. Both continuous and discrete selection criteria are considered. Query optimization strategies are categorized into static and dynamic. Static optimization strategies discussed are the optimal design of bitmaps, and algorithms based on tree and logical reduction. The dynamic optimization discussed is the approach of inclusion and exclusion for both bit-sliced indexes and encoded bitmap indexes.

title: Generating Personal Travel Guides from Discourse Plans
abstract: This paper describes a system that delivers travel guides tailored to individual needs. It does so by integrating a discourse planner with a system for querying the web and generating synthesised web pages using document prescriptions. We show by way of example how a user model can lead to a personal travel guide, and show what this might look like in different media. We briefly describe the investigations we are undertaking to determine the utility of such approaches.

title: A Bayesian Method for Guessing the Extreme Values in a Data Set
abstract: For a large number of data management problems, it would be very useful to be able to obtain a few samples from a data set, and to use the samples to guess the largest (or smallest) value in the entire data set. Min/max online aggregation, top-k query processing, outlier detection, and distance join are just a few possible applications. This paper details a statistically rigorous, Bayesian approach to attacking this problem. Just as importantly, we demonstrate the utility of our approach by showing how it can be applied to two specific problems that arise in the context of data management.

title: Participatory design with individuals who have amnesia
abstract: We present experiences and insights into participatory design with individuals who have anterograde amnesia and therefore have extreme difficulty storing new memories. We discuss our design of the design process, and present a set of techniques used to support memory during and between design sessions. From this experience, we identify cognitive assumptions of participatory design that break down when working with amnestics. We generalize these ideas into an analytical framework for researchers and practitioners who intend to use participatory design with persons having various kinds of cognitive impairments. We illustrate the framework by analyzing a cognitive deficit unrelated to memory that we encountered, and an unanticipated benefit from what at first appeared to be a liability in working with this design team.

title: Distortion compensated lookup-table embedding: joint security and robustness enhancement for quantization-based data hiding
abstract: Data embedding mechanism used for authentication applications should be secure in order to prevent an adversary from forging the embedded data at his/her will. Meanwhile, semi-fragileness is often preferred to allow for distinguishing content changes versus non-content changes. In this paper, we focus on jointly enhancing the robustness and security of the embedding mechanism, which can be used as a building block for authentication. The paper presents analysis showing that embedding through a look-up table (LUT) of non-trivial run that maps quantized multimedia features randomly to binary data offers a probability of detection error considerably smaller than that of the traditional quantization embedding. We quantify the security strength of LUT embedding and enhance its robustness through distortion compensation. We introduce a combined security and capacity measure and show that the proposed distortion compensated LUT embedding provides joint enhancement of security and robustness over the traditional quantization embedding.

title: Video access control via multi-level data hiding
abstract: The paper proposes novel data hiding algorithms and system design for high quality digital video. Instead of targeting on a single degree of robustness, which results in overestimation and/or underestimation of the noise conditions, we apply multi-level embedding to digital video to achieve more than one level of robustness-capacity tradeoff. In addition, an adaptive technique is proposed to determine how many bits are embedded in each part of the video. Besides user data, control information such as synchronization and the number of hidden user bits are embedded as well. The algorithm can be used for applications such as access control.