waashk/acm huggingface dataset:
do batch and user evaluations give the same results?  _do improvements in system performance demonstrated by batch evaluations confer the same benefit for real users? we carried out experiments designed to investigate this question. after identifying a weighting scheme that gave maximum improvement over the baseline in a non-interactive evaluation, we used it with real users searching on an instance recall task. our results showed the weighting scheme giving beneficial results in batch studies did not do so with real users. further analysis did identify other factors predictive of instance recall, including number of documents saved by the user, document recall, and number of documents seen by the user._  william hersh andrew turpin susan price benjamin chan dale kramer lynetta sacherek daniel olson
reducing recovery constraints on locking based protocols  serializability is the standard correctness criterion for concurrency control. to ensure correctness in the presence of failures, recoverability is also imposed. pragmatic considerations result in further constraints, for instance, the existing log-based recovery implementations that use before- images warrant that transaction executions be strict. strict executions are restrictive, thus sacrificing concurrency and throughput. in this paper we identify the relation between the recovery mechanism and the restrictions imposed by concurrency control protocols. in particular, we propose a new inverse operation that can be integrated with the underlying recovery mechanism. in order to establish the viability of our approach, we demonstrate the new implementation by making minor modifications to the conventional recovery architecture. this inverse operation is also designed to avoid the undesirable phenomenon of cascading aborts when transactions execute conflicting write operations.  g. alonso d. agrawal a. el abbadi
perceptual vs. hardware performance in advanced acoustic interface design  this panel brings together experts in the field of non-speech auditory displays with points of view ranging from long-term basic research in human perception to the timely production of useable tools in commercial systems. the panel will examine issues of perceptual validity and engineering performance from several different perspectives representative of current work in the field, and discuss how such issues can or should impact decisions made during technology development. panelists' perspectives include: levels of analysis in designing and using auditory interfaces (gaver), an example of what can be learned about implementation requirements for low-level psychophysical studies (wenzel), designing integrated systems to encompass sonification in a three-dimensional environment (foster), issues in the study of information transfer in representational acoustic signals (levkowitz), and the design of a generalized technology platform for acoustic signal presentation (powell).  elizabeth m. wenzel
sirio: a distributed information system over a heterogeneous computer network  this paper presents the sirio project, a commercial experience within spanish industry, developed for tecnatom s.a. by the data and knowledge bases research group at the technical university of madrid. sirio runs over a heterogeneous local area network, with a client- server architecture, using the following tools: oracle as rdbms, running over a unix server, tcp/ip as a communication protocol, ethernet toolkit for the distributed client- server architecture, and c as the host programming language for the distributed applications (every one of them is rather complex and very different from the rest). the system uses computers with ms-dos, connected to the server over the lan.  sirio is mainly based on the conceptual design of an rdb, upon which several distributed applications are operational as big software modules. these applications are: 1.- the inspection programs, the management of their corresponding criteria and the automatic generation of queries. 2.- graphics processing and interface definition. 3.- interactive rdb updating. 4.- historical db management. 5.- massive load of on-field obtained data. 6.- report and query application.  the approach of the sirio integrated information system presented here is a pioneering one. there are about two dozen companies worldwide in this field and none has developed such an advanced system to this day. from 1992, sirio is totally operational in the tecnatom s.a. industry. it constitutes an important tool to obtain the reports (from different plants) for the clients, for the state control organizations, and for the specialized analyst staff.  c. r. costilla m. j. bas j. villamor
design and evaluation rules for building adaptive schema in an object-oriented data and knowledge base system  we develop a selection of design and evaluation rules for building an adaptive schema in an object-oriented data and knowledge base system. this set of style rules include not only those which we use to preserve validity and minimality of an object-oriented schema, but also those which help us to promote extensibility, reusability and adaptiveness of an object-oriented schema against future requirement changes. we encourage to use the set of style rules proposed as a means for validating quality of a schema, and for transforming an object-oriented schema into a better style regarding to adaptiveness and robustness, rather than as a user- oriented method solely for designing the schema.  ling liu
widening the net (workshop)(abstract only): the theory and practice of physical and electronic communities  this 1.5 day workshop will bring together designers and researchers working on on-line communities, to discuss: (a) existing understanding of real-world cummunities; (b) experiences with the behaviour, implementation and design of on-line communities; (c) lessons from "traditional" cscw systems. we will develop design goals for such communities and identify oustanding research issues.  steve whittaker ellen isaacs vicki o'day
virtual environments at work: ongoing use of muds in the workplace in recent years much attention has been paid to network-based, distributed environments like text-based muds and moos for supporting collaborative work. such environments offer a shared virtual world in which interactions can take place irrespective of the actual physical proximity or distance of interactants. although these environments have proven successful within social, recreational and educational domains, few data have been reported concerning use of such systems in the workplace. in this paper we summarize in-depth interviews with 8 mudders from a software research and development community where a mud has been operational and actively used for a number of years. the interviews suggest that the mud fills a valuable communication niche for this workgroup, being used both synchronously and asynchronously to enable the establishment of new contacts and the maintenance of existing contacts. these observations are discussed in the context of the organization under study. elizabeth f. churchill sara bly
design of an opac database to permit different subject searching accesses in a multi-disciplines universities library catalogue database  this paper presents searching approaches and user interface capabilities of duo, an online public access catalogue (opac) designed to permit the users of three universities of the northeast of italy different subject searching accesses to the co-operative multi-disciplines library catalogue database.  the co-operative catalogue database is managed by one of the software systems developed under the italian national project for library automation: the sbn project. since the sbn database has not been designed to be efficiently accessed for end-user searches, the duo database has been designed to avoid duplication of the sbn database data and to be usable for making efficient subjects accesses to the catalogue documents. the duo design choices are presented, in particular the main choice of designing a "virtual" document that corresponds to each sbn document and that has unstructured data usable for subject search purposes.  the paper presents a new kind of user-opac dialogue that makes available to the user different search approaches and on- line dictionaries. in particular the user during the interaction with the search tool can represent his information needs with the support of interface capabilities that are based on retrieval path history, and words and codes on- line dictionaries.  duo is the first italian opac that has been made openly available to users of universities and research institutions. for this reason, it is also the first time that opac log data is going to be collected in italy. this work mainly intends to make a modern opac available to the users of a sbn catalogue database, but it is going to permit also to build up a knowledge on opac usage in italy.  maristella agosti maurizio masotti
multidimensional access methods  search operations in databases require special support at the physical level. this is true for conventional databases as well as spatial databases, where typical search operations include the point query (find all objects that contain a given search point) and the region query (find all objects that overlap a given search region). more than ten years of spatial database research have resulted in a great variety of multidimensional access methods to support such operations. we give an overview of that work. after a brief survey of spatial data management in general, we first present the class of point access methods, which are used to search sets of points in two or more dimensions. the second part of the paper is devoted to spatial access methods to handle extended objects, such as rectangles or polyhedra. we conclude with a discussion of theoretical and experimental results concerning the relative performance of various approaches.  volker gaede oliver gunther
a research program to assess user perceptions of group work support  computer support for group work is a technological innovation receiving considerable attention from developmental researchers. this paper reports the preliminary results from two surveys which assessed user perceived needs for various types of group work support. the instruments, distributed to managers and professionals in a variety of organizations, described group support scenarios and associated functions/tools and asked for an assessment of their usefulness to one of the respondent's organizational work groups. support for between meetings group work was perceived to be more useful than support for either face to face or electronic meetings. common single user tools were generally perceived to be more useful than multi-user group tools. individual differences and implications are addressed.  john satzinger lorne olfman
efficient optimization of simple chase join expressions  simple chase join expressions are relational algebra expressions, involving only projection and join operators, defined on the basis of the functional dependencies associated with the database scheme. they are meaningful in the weak instance model, because for certain classes of schemes, including independent schemes, the total projections of the representative instance can be computed by means of unions of simple chase join expressions. we show how unions of simple chase join expressions can be optimized efficiently, without constructing and chasing the corresponding tableaux. we also present efficient algorithms for testing containment and equivalence, and for optimizing individual simple chase join expressions.  paolo atzeni edward p. f. chan
an analytic model in the study of physical database reorganization (abstract only)  an analytic model is defined to be used in the study of automated physical database reorganization. periodic reorganizations are called for so that an acceptable database performance level may be maintained. database performance is defined in terms of the physical structures which comprise the database. the performance of a particular structure is measured in terms of its storage, retrieval, and update costs. a reorganization is called for when the current performance level, or cost, of the database exceeds the sum of the projected cost (following a reorganization) and the cost of performing a reorganization. recommendations regarding structural changes are made by the model. the model addresses three such possibilities - the choice of a primary storage structure, the selection of the optimal set of secondary indices, and cleanup of overflow chains. the results of experiments which were conducted using the model are presented. the model is evaluated regarding its usefulness in database performance studies, its generalizability to various database environments, and its extendibility.  julia hodges
data models in database management  it is a combination of three components: 1) a collection of data structure types (the building blocks of any database that conforms to the model);  2) a collection of operators or inferencing rules, which can be applied to any valid instances of the data types listed in (1), to retrieve or derive data from any parts of those structures in any combinations desired;  3) a collection of general integrity rules, which implicitly or explicitly define the set of consistent database states or changes of state or both--- these rules may sometimes be expressed as insert-update-delete rules.  e. f. codd
structural matching and discovery in document databases  structural matching and discovery in documents such as sgml and html is important for data warehousing [6], version management [7, 11], hypertext authoring, digital libraries [4] and internet databases. as an example, a user of the world wide web may be interested in knowing changes in an html document [2, 5, 10]. such changes can be detected by comparing the old and new version of the document (referred to as structural matching of documents). as another example, in hypertext authoring, a user may wish to find the common portions in the history list of a document or in a database of documents (referred to as structural discovery of documents). in sigmod 95 demo sessions, we exhibited a software package, called treediff [13], for comparing two latex documents and showing their differences. given two documents, the tool represents the documents as ordered labeled trees and finds an optimal sequence of edit operations to transform one document (tree) to the other. an edit operation could be an insert, delete, or change of a node in the trees. the tool is so named because documents are represented and compared using approximate tree matching techniques [9, 12, 14].  jason tsong-li wang dennis shasha george j. s. chang liam relihan kaizhong zhang girish patel
on conjunctive queries containing inequalities  conjunctive queries are generalized so that inequality comparisons can be made between elements of the query. algorithms for containment and equivalence of such "inequality queries" are given, under the assumption that the data domains are dense and totally ordered. in general, containment does not imply the existence of homomorphisms (containment mappings), but the homomorphism property does exist for subclasses of inequality queries. a minimization algorithm is defined using the equivalence algorithm. it is first shown that the constants appearing in a query can be divided into "essential" and "nonessential" subgroups. the minimum query can be nondeterministically guessed using only the essential constants of the original query.  anthony klug
enhancing the usability of an office information system through direct manipulation  in office information systems, the primary focus has been to integrate facilities for the communication and management of information. however, the human factors aspects of the design of office systems are equally important considerations if such office systems are to gain widespread acceptance and use. the application of design techniques from human factors can help enhance the usability of an office system. in this paper, we describe the user interface of an office system developed by adapting such design techniques.  alison lee f. h. lochovsky
statistical semantics: how can a computer use what people name things to guess what things people mean when they name things?  the descriptors or categories assigned to entries in an information system form the basis of most retrieval mechanisms (e.g., menu or key word). these descriptors are the primary means of communication between system designers and end users. in this paper we analyze some of the factors which influence this communication link. our goal is to uncover some psychological principles that will help us to understand naming and describing behavior and thus improve the communication between designers and users.  in traditional communication (e.g., conversation) the communicator can accommodate to different listeners, both by shifting perspective and by attending to explicit feedback from the listener. in describing items in a data base, however, system designers are at a disadvantage in that they do not usually get explicit, immediate, and continuous feedback from users. knowing how people describe common objects and shift their descriptions for audiences of different levels of sophistication may help designers build systems whose information is accessible to the widest possible audience.  george w. furnas louis m. gomez thomas k. landauer susan t. dumais
mgen - a generator for menu driven programs  many interactive computer applications can with advantage be built after the menu principle.  mgen is a program that automatically builds a skeleton of a menu driven program.  it is a well known problem that users of programs normally cannot state what they really want until they see the finished program running. with mgen, the resulting program can be simulated by the use of examples.  to enable efficient utilization by skilled users, a feature called "quick selection" is implemented.  bertil friman
predicting the time to recall computer command abbreviations  a goms theory of stimulus-response compatibility is shown to predict response- time performance on a command/abbreviation encoding task. working with parameters that were set by an earlier study and which have rational, task- meaningful interpretations as mapping, motor, perception and retrieval operators, zero- parameter predictions were made that fit the observed performance with r2 = 0.776 (p<0.05). the reasonableness of the parameters, the algorithms used to generate the predictions, and the weighting assumption used to combine algorithms into a single prediction are discussed.  bonnie e. john allen newell
partitioned two-phase locking  in a large integrated database, there often exists an "information hierarchy," where both raw data and derived data are stored and used together. therefore, among update transactions, there will often be some that perform only read accesses from a certain (i.e., the "raw" data) portion of the database and write into another (i.e., the "derived" data) portion. a conventional concurrency control algorithm would have treated such transactions as regular update transactions and subjected them to the usual protocols for synchronizing update transactions. in this paper such transactions are examined more closely. the purpose is to devise concurrency control methods that allow the computation of derived information to proceed without interfering with the updating of raw data.  the first part of the paper presents a proof method for correctness of concurrency control algorithms in a hierarchically decomposed database. the proof method provides a framework for understanding the intricacies in dealing with hierarchically decomposed databases. the second part of the paper is an application of the proof method to show the correctness of a two-phase- locking- based algorithm, called partitioned two-phase locking, for hierarchically decomposed databases. this algorithm is a natural extension to the version pool method proposed previously in the literature.  meichun hsu arvola chan
groupware comes to the internet: charting a new world early experiences with web-based groupware point to new collaboration opportunities within and between organizations. we report the results of a study of more than 100 organizations that have used web-based groupware to understand better how they are using it and what advantages and disadvantages they have experienced. we then use these data to develop a framework for analyzing and assessing the fit of groupware systems to organizational needs. we close with a discussion of the evolution and future of groupware. bradley c. wheeler alan r. dennis laurence i. press
european research in visual interfaces (panel): experiences and perspectives  the goal of this panel is to discuss some significant examples of current r&amp;d; projects related to visual interfaces, which are part of the different r&amp;d; programmes partially funded by the european commission, and in particular of the esprit programme. even if the panel will concentrate on user interface issues, the scope of the presented projects is fairly broad: from user interface development technologies (as in hyperface and interactors), to banking and financial environments and applications (as in fast), to hypermedia platforms and applications (as in miners), to navigational user interfaces to traditional information systems (as in hifi), to multimedia educational environments (as in multed), to multimedia medical information (as in milord), to 3d interaction with data bases (as in fadiva). all the presented projects make large use of multimedia concepts and technologies.  roberto polillo sebastiano bagnara heinz-dieter d. böcker antonio cantatore alessandro d'atri paolo paolini
aqr-toolkit: an adaptive query routing middleware for distributed data intensive systems  query routing is an intelligent service that can direct query requests to appropriate servers that are capable of answering the queries. the goal of a query routing system is to provide efficient associative access to a large, heterogeneous, distributed collection of information providers by routing a user query to the most relevant information sources that can provide the best answer. effective query routing not only minimizes the query response time and the overall processing cost, but also eliminates a lot of unnecessary communication overhead over the global networks and over the individual information sources.  the aqr-toolkit divides the query routing task into two cooperating processes: query refinement and source selection. it is well known that a broadly defined query inevitably produces many false positives. query refinement provides mechanisms to help the user formulate queries that will return more useful results and that can be processed efficiently. as a complimentary process, source selection reduces false negatives by identifying and locating a set of relevant information providers from a large collection of available sources. by pruning irrelevant information sources, source selection also reduces the overhead of contacting the information servers that do not contribute to the answer of the query.  the system architecture of aqr-toolkit consists of a hierarchical network (a directed acyclic graph) with external information providers at the leaves and query routers as mediating nodes. the end-point information providers support query-based access to their documents. at a query router node, a user may browse and query the meta information about information providers registered at that query router or make use of the router's facilitates for query refinement and source selection.  ling liu calton pu david buttler wei han henrique paques wei tang