Emanuele Della Valle – författare

This book examines the problem of relevant query answering over the Web and provides a comprehensive overview of relevant query answering over streaming and distributed data. In recent years, Web applications that combine highly dynamic data streams with data distributed over the Web to provide relevant answers have attracted increasing attention. Answering in a timely fashion, i.e., reactively, is one of the most important performance indicators, especially when the distributed data is evolving. The book proposes a solution that retains a local replica of the distributed data and offers various maintenance policies to refresh the replica over time. A limited refresh budget guarantees the reactiveness of the system. Focusing on stream processing and Semantic Web, it appeals to scientists and graduate students in the field.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of core concepts and technological foundations for continuous engineering of Web streams. It presents various systems and applications and includes real-world examples. Last not least, it introduces the readers to RSP4J, a novel open-source project that aims to gather community efforts in software engineering and empirical research.

The book starts with an introductory chapter that positions the work by explaining what motivates the design of specific techniques for processing data streams using Web technologies. Chapter 2 briefly summarizes the necessary background concepts and models needed to understand the remaining content of the book. Subsequently, chapter 3 focuses on processing RDF streams, taming data velocity in an open environment characterized by high data variety. It introduces query answering algorithms with RSP-QL and analytics functions over streaming data. Chapter 4 presents the life cycle of streaming linked data, it focuses on publishing streams on the Web as a prerequisite aspect to make data findable and accessible for applications. Chapter 5 touches on the problems of benchmarks and systems that analyze Web streams to foster technological progress. It surveys existing benchmarks and introduces guidelines that may support new practitioners in approaching the issue of continuous analytics. Finally, chapter 6 presents a list of examples and exercises that will help the reader to approach the area, get used to its practices and become confident in its technological possibilities.

Overall, this book is mainly written for graduate students and researchers in Web and stream data management. It collects research results and will guide the next generation of researchers and practitioners.

With the proliferation of huge amounts of (heterogeneous) data on the Web, the importance of information retrieval (IR) has grown considerably over the last few years. Big players in the computer industry, such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, are the primary contributors of technology for fast access to Web-based information; and searching capabilities are now integrated into most information systems, ranging from business management software and customer relationship systems to social networks and mobile phone applications.

Ceri and his co-authors aim at taking their readers from the foundations of modern information retrieval to the most advanced challenges of Web IR. To this end, their book is divided into three parts. The first part addresses the principles of IR and provides a systematic and compact description of basic information retrieval techniques (including binary, vector space and probabilistic models as well as natural language search processing) before focusing on its application to the Web. Part two addresses the foundational aspects of Web IR by discussing the general architecture of search engines (with a focus on the crawling and indexing processes), describing link analysis methods (specifically Page Rank and HITS), addressing recommendation and diversification, and finally presenting advertising in search (the main source of revenues for search engines). The third and final part describes advanced aspects of Web search, each chapter providing a self-contained, up-to-date survey on current Web research directions. Topics in this part include meta-search and multi-domain search, semantic search, search in the context of multimedia data, and crowd search.

The book is ideally suited to courses on information retrieval, as it covers all Web-independent foundational aspects. Its presentation is self-contained and does not require prior background knowledge. It can also be used in the context of classic courses on data management, allowing the instructor to cover both structured and unstructured data in various formats. Its classroom use is facilitated by a set of slides, which can be downloaded from www.search-computing.org.