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Register a new userXLSearch: A Search Engine for Spreadsheets
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Added by
Michael Kohlhase
Publication date
2014
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Spreadsheets are end-user programs and domain models that are heavily employed in administration, financial forecasting, education, and science because of their intuitive, flexible, and direct approach to computation. As a result, institutions are swamped by millions of spreadsheets that are becoming increasingly difficult to manage, access, and control. This note presents the XLSearch system, a novel search engine for spreadsheets. It indexes spreadsheet formulae and efficiently answers formula queries via unification (a complex query language that allows metavariables in both the query as well as the index). But a web-based search engine is only one application of the underlying technology: Spreadsheet formula export to web standards like MathML combined with formula indexing can be used to find similar spreadsheets or common formula errors.
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Data processing systems impose multiple views on data as it is processed by the system. These views include spreadsheets, databases, matrices, and graphs. The common theme amongst these views is the need to store and operate on data as whole sets instead of as individual data elements. This work describes a common mathematical representation of these data sets (associative arrays) that applies across a wide range of applications and technologies. Associative arrays unify and simplify these different approaches for representing and manipulating data into common two-dimensional view of data. Specifically, associative arrays (1) reduce the effort required to pass data between steps in a data processing system, (2) allow steps to be interchanged with full confidence that the results will be unchanged, and (3) make it possible to recognize when steps can be simplified or eliminated. Most database system naturally support associative arrays via their tabular interfaces. The D4M implementation of associative arrays uses this feature to provide a common interface across SQL, NoSQL, and NewSQL databases.
A central challenge in science is to understand how systems behaviors emerge from complex networks. This often requires aggregating, reusing, and integrating heterogeneous information. Supplementary spreadsheets to articles are a key data source. Spreadsheets are popular because they are easy to read and write. However, spreadsheets are often difficult to reanalyze because they capture data ad hoc without schemas that define the objects, relationships, and attributes that they represent. To help researchers reuse and compose spreadsheets, we developed ObjTables, a toolkit that makes spreadsheets human- and machine-readable by combining spreadsheets with schemas and an object-relational mapping system. ObjTables includes a format for schemas; markup for indicating the class and attribute represented by each spreadsheet and column; numerous data types for scientific information; and high-level software for using schemas to read, write, validate, compare, merge, revision, and analyze spreadsheets. By making spreadsheets easier to reuse, ObjTables could enable unprecedented secondary meta-analyses. By making it easy to build new formats and associated software for new types of data, ObjTables can also accelerate emerging scientific fields.
Background: The web has become a primary information resource about illnesses and treatments for both medical and non-medical users. Standard web search is by far the most common interface for such information. It is therefore of interest to find out how well web search engines work for diagnostic queries and what factors contribute to successes and failures. Among diseases, rare (or orphan) diseases represent an especially challenging and thus interesting class to diagnose as each is rare, diverse in symptoms and usually has scattered resources associated with it. Methods: We use an evaluation approach for web search engines for rare disease diagnosis which includes 56 real life diagnostic cases, state-of-the-art evaluation measures, and curated information resources. In addition, we introduce FindZebra, a specialized (vertical) rare disease search engine. FindZebra is powered by open source search technology and uses curated freely available online medical information. Results: FindZebra outperforms Google Search in both default setup and customised to the resources used by FindZebra. We extend FindZebra with specialized functionalities exploiting medical ontological information and UMLS medical concepts to demonstrate different ways of displaying the retrieved results to medical experts. Conclusions: Our results indicate that a specialized search engine can improve the diagnostic quality without compromising the ease of use of the currently widely popular web search engines. The proposed evaluation approach can be valuable for future development and benchmarking. The FindZebra search engine is available at http://www.findzebra.com/.
Much like on-premises systems, the natural choice for running database analytics workloads in the cloud is to provision a cluster of nodes to run a database instance. However, analytics workloads are often bursty or low volume, leaving clusters idle much of the time, meaning customers pay for compute resources even when unused. The ability of cloud function services, such as AWS Lambda or Azure Functions, to run small, fine granularity tasks make them appear to be a natural choice for query processing in such settings. But implementing an analytics system on cloud functions comes with its own set of challenges. These include managing hundreds of tiny stateless resource-constrained workers, handling stragglers, and shuffling data through opaque cloud services. In this paper we present Starling, a query execution engine built on cloud function services that employs number of techniques to mitigate these challenges, providing interactive query latency at a lower total cost than provisioned systems with low-to-moderate utilization. In particular, on a 1TB TPC-H dataset in cloud storage, Starling is less expensive than the best provisioned systems for workloads when queries arrive 1 minute apart or more. Starling also has lower latency than competing systems reading from cloud object stores and can scale to larger datasets.
Existing data storage systems offer a wide range of functionalities to accommodate an equally diverse range of applications. However, new classes of applications have emerged, e.g., blockchain and collaborative analytics, featuring data versioning, fork semantics, tamper-evidence or any combination thereof. They present new opportunities for storage systems to efficiently support such applications by embedding the above requirements into the storage. In this paper, we present ForkBase, a storage engine specifically designed to provide efficient support for blockchain and forkable applications. By integrating the core application properties into the storage, ForkBase not only delivers high performance but also reduces development effort. Data in ForkBase is multi-versioned, and each version uniquely identifies the data content and its history. Two variants of fork semantics are supported in ForkBase to facilitate any collaboration workflows. A novel index structure is introduced to efficiently identify and eliminate duplicate content across data objects. Consequently, ForkBase is not only efficient in performance, but also in space requirement. We demonstrate the performance of ForkBase using three applications: a blockchain platform, a wiki engine and a collaborative analytics application. We conduct extensive experimental evaluation of these applications against respective state-of-the-art system. The results show that ForkBase achieves superior performance while significantly lowering the development cost.
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