Djoerd Hiemstra’s home page

The slides of yesterday’s meeting, as well as the project descriptions are all on-line in the Archive section. Please choose a project and notify Maurice van Keulen. Deadline Friday 24 April.

More on TeleTOP.

Information Retrieval is the discipline that studies computer-based search tools. Many applications that handle information on the internet would be completely inadequate without the support of information retrieval technology. How would we manage our email without spam filtering? How would we find information on the world wide web if there were no web search engines? The rise of web search engines has been one of the major success stories in computer science of the last decade: Internet and search companies like Google and Yahoo are now among the world’s most influential information technology companies.

Today, search technology is provided and developed by major search providers like Google and Yahoo, and by small specialized companies with specialized staff. But as search technology matures, it will have to be available to non-expert application developers as well. A major obstacle to achieve this, is the lack of theories and high-level abstractions of search systems and the lack of declarative query languages. Another obstacle is the lack of methods to handle non-textual data, such as images, audio and video. Several projects of the Database Group of the University of Twente try to solve these problems for application areas such as Entity Search, Expert Search, Video Search, and Distributed Search. The models and approaches that are developed in these projects are evaluated on large scale, realistic testbeds, and implemented in the group’s open source search system PF/Tijah, a search system that combines keyword queries with structured queries on XML databases. The research contributes to the several courses in the university’s graduate programs, for instance Information Retrieval, and XML & Databases 1 and XML & Databases 2.

The slides of yesterday’s XML & Databases kick-off meeting, as well as the project descriptions are all on-line in the TeleTOP Archive. Please choose a project and notify both Maurice van Keulen and Djoerd Hiemstra. Deadline Tuesday 22 April.

The kick-off meeting of the course XML & Databases 2 is moved from Tuesday 15 April to Thursday 17 April (8:30 - 10.15) in LA 3522. In this course you will do a small piece of research concerning XML databases by contributing to one of the extensions of MonetDB/XQuery that are currently being developed at the Database Group of the University of Twente:

• Full text search (PF/Tijah)
• Probabilistic XML
• Geographic XML (MonetDB/GIS)

Hope to see you on Thursday 17 April.

Read more on TeleTOP

I have created an “assignment” in the roster as the location where you can upload your final paper. Please also include source code of your prototype.

4. Theme Ik heb een discussieforum voor het thema “XML en GIS” aangemaakt (en er ook al een eerste berichtje gepost).

Due to the much larger number of students than we expected, we perhaps need to have additional assignments to accomodate everybody. This will be done on a per theme-basis, i.e. we will assign more project groups to a theme than there are assignments. On the first theme meeting, we will explain which other possible assignments can be done, so we can discuss what each group is going to do. If desired, there is the opportunity to switch assignment within the theme.

Because of small delays for several projects, exam stress, and tropical temperatures, there will be no final project presentations in the exam period this year. Instead, we will ask some the project groups to give a short presentation to members of the Database Group. We will be lenient on the deadline of 30 June as long as we know that you are still actively working on the project. Please send us as soon as possible the status of your project and the date you plan to send in the paper.

Please take the following actions:

• Choose an assignment, preferably in groups of two students
• Report your decision by email to both Maurice van Keulen and Djoerd Hiemstra
• One group per assignment: first come, first serve
• Deadline: 28 april 2006

In the Archive section on TeleTOP you can find additional information for each project assignment.

The kick-off meeting of the course XML & Databases 2 (211086) takes place on:

Tuesday 25 April at 9:00 h. - 10.30 h. in room ZI-5126.

At this meeting we will present the research projects and plan further meetings. Please notify us as soon as possible if you are unable to attend.