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ER 2002
Data & Knowledge Engineering 54 (2005) 1–2 www.elsevier.com/locate/datak
Preface
ER 2002
Conferences provide researchers with the fastest way to disseminate their ideas and results to a selected community of other researchers in the same domain. Conferences, however, must enforce limitations in the size of the written contribution as well as in the time allocated for the on-site presentation of the contribution. They also have a limited audience, although some publishers have a dissemination scheme that brings conference proceedings to a much wider audience than just the actual participants at the conference. Publication of an extended version of a conference paper is a much appreciated opportunity for researchers to widely disseminate a significantly improved presentation of their work, where they can develop the appropriate motivations, reasoning, results and comparative analysis. We are please to offer in this DKE issue extended versions of four papers that were selected from the papers presented at the 21st International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2002), held October 7–11 in Tampere, Finland. These papers were selected based on their quality, relevancy, significance, and the viability of extending their results. All extended papers were subjected to a stringent review process and authors were required to respond to all concerns expressed by the reviewers before papers were eventually accepted for publication in the journal. The paper ‘‘Automating the Extraction of Data from HTML Tables with Unknown Structure’’, by David W. Embley, Cui Tao, and Stephen W. Liddle, addresses the nowadays essential issue of extracting knowledge from web pages. The problem at hand is how to identify, in web pages, tables of interest to a specific application, then extract the content of those tables and determine the proper way to restructure them so that their content can be integrated into a single, global and homogeneous table. The latter can then be queried according to normal database querying procedures. Knowledge extraction is also the topic for the paper entitled ‘‘Extracting Conceptual Relationships from Specialized Documents’’, by Bowen Hui and Eric Yu. Here, the source documents that are considered are scientific research papers and patents, from which the authorÕs technique extracts problem–solution relationships, seen as essential information in the analysis of scientific literature. Experimental results are discussed. ‘‘Conceptual Modeling for Customized XML Schemas’’, by Ramez Elmasri, Qing Li, Jack Fu, Yu-Chi Wu, Babak Hojabri, and Swathi Ande, provides a complete environment to enable 0169-023X/$ - see front matter Ó 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.datak.2004.10.005
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Preface / Data & Knowledge Engineering 54 (2005) 1–2
management of XML schemas and data using traditional database technology. The proposal first applies conceptual modeling methodologies to the design of XML schema. This step is complemented with the generation of customized views, SQL queries to the XML schema, and creation of XML instance documents from the result of the query. Finally, the paper by Bernhard Thalheim, ‘‘Component Development and Construction for Database Design’’, proposes a design theory to build large database schemas from identifiable sub-schemas, in a component based approach. Component constructors are defined to iteratively build the target schema. We are sure these papers provide significant and relevant references for DKE readers. Salvatore T. March Stefano Spaccapietra ER 2002 Programme Co-Chairs E-mail address: [email protected] (S.T. March) Available online 20 November 2004
Preface
ER 2002
Conferences provide researchers with the fastest way to disseminate their ideas and results to a selected community of other researchers in the same domain. Conferences, however, must enforce limitations in the size of the written contribution as well as in the time allocated for the on-site presentation of the contribution. They also have a limited audience, although some publishers have a dissemination scheme that brings conference proceedings to a much wider audience than just the actual participants at the conference. Publication of an extended version of a conference paper is a much appreciated opportunity for researchers to widely disseminate a significantly improved presentation of their work, where they can develop the appropriate motivations, reasoning, results and comparative analysis. We are please to offer in this DKE issue extended versions of four papers that were selected from the papers presented at the 21st International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2002), held October 7–11 in Tampere, Finland. These papers were selected based on their quality, relevancy, significance, and the viability of extending their results. All extended papers were subjected to a stringent review process and authors were required to respond to all concerns expressed by the reviewers before papers were eventually accepted for publication in the journal. The paper ‘‘Automating the Extraction of Data from HTML Tables with Unknown Structure’’, by David W. Embley, Cui Tao, and Stephen W. Liddle, addresses the nowadays essential issue of extracting knowledge from web pages. The problem at hand is how to identify, in web pages, tables of interest to a specific application, then extract the content of those tables and determine the proper way to restructure them so that their content can be integrated into a single, global and homogeneous table. The latter can then be queried according to normal database querying procedures. Knowledge extraction is also the topic for the paper entitled ‘‘Extracting Conceptual Relationships from Specialized Documents’’, by Bowen Hui and Eric Yu. Here, the source documents that are considered are scientific research papers and patents, from which the authorÕs technique extracts problem–solution relationships, seen as essential information in the analysis of scientific literature. Experimental results are discussed. ‘‘Conceptual Modeling for Customized XML Schemas’’, by Ramez Elmasri, Qing Li, Jack Fu, Yu-Chi Wu, Babak Hojabri, and Swathi Ande, provides a complete environment to enable 0169-023X/$ - see front matter Ó 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.datak.2004.10.005
2
Preface / Data & Knowledge Engineering 54 (2005) 1–2
management of XML schemas and data using traditional database technology. The proposal first applies conceptual modeling methodologies to the design of XML schema. This step is complemented with the generation of customized views, SQL queries to the XML schema, and creation of XML instance documents from the result of the query. Finally, the paper by Bernhard Thalheim, ‘‘Component Development and Construction for Database Design’’, proposes a design theory to build large database schemas from identifiable sub-schemas, in a component based approach. Component constructors are defined to iteratively build the target schema. We are sure these papers provide significant and relevant references for DKE readers. Salvatore T. March Stefano Spaccapietra ER 2002 Programme Co-Chairs E-mail address: [email protected] (S.T. March) Available online 20 November 2004