Database and Semantic Web Research Group
Welcome to the home page of the Database Research Group at University of the West Scotland.
We have been active in these overlapping areas of research since early 2000 and do both theoretical and systems work in:
- Database Theory,
- Qualitative and Semantic Information Theory,
- Information SystemsIntegration , and
- Semantic Web Services and Semantic Technology .
Area of Study
Objectives
Research Focus
Area of Study
- Databases’ capability is limited in terms of inference. Especially, when users explore information beyond the scope of data within a database, the database normally cannot provide the information. The underlying reason of the problem is that queries are answered based on a direct match between a query and data (up to aggregations of the data). We observe that it is possible to find information from a database beyond that. Moreover, what a database provides is not necessarily information. To this end, we are motivated to explore how the notion of ‘information’ may be drawn on directly and propose a framework for explicitly reasoning about the information content of data in a database.
- Dretske’s (1981) work is around the topic of “information-based theory of knowledge” as an epistemology. However, as far as we know, there is barely any work recognized in the literature that relates Dretske’s work to semantic interoperability between information systems.
- We aim to expand the knowledge in the creation of stronger information systems while reasoning about the information content of data in a database. Underlying theories of semantic aspects of information, Information Flow Channel theory (Barwise and Seligman 1997), semiotics and the mathematical theory of communication will be exploited.
- To investigate how to map an ontology, as 'standard' domain knowledge, with databases, whereby to achieve semantic interoperability between them. It is envisaged that this would help reason about the 'information content' of data and thereby to reveal more relevant and useful information. To this end, major contempory approaches to linking ontologies and databases for deriving information will be investigated.
- An overarching feature of web services architecture is its lack of semantic information. We envisage that the information can be extracted from semantic web structure by automatically locating and providing the best match of the asked services. In addition, semantic information can be obtained by the Ontology mapping based on semantic alignment.
Objectives
- Determine the representational efficacy of databases including the syntactic aspect of databases and the consequences this has for the use of databases, using the concept of information content of data. Determine whether databases are self-consistent and explain why.
- Dretske’s (1981) semantic theory of information and Barwise and Seligman’s (1997) information flow channel theory (IF) are taken into consideration for a quantitative and qualitative approach that this study adopts respectively. we work on fundamental theories like Relative Information Capacity (Hull 1986, Miller et al 1994) and the notion of Information Bearing Capability (IBC) (Feng 2000) to extend existing systems and practices.
- Using Formal Concept Analysis (FCA), Schema Intention Graphy (SIG) and IF to extract knowledge from individual database whereby to establish semantic interoperability.
- Extend the notion of information content inclusion (IIR) if possible, and prove any correspondences between IIR and current deductive databasesi, with a view to extending such (if any) to first order logics (FOL).
- Extend IIR to include the use of ontologies for the purposes of inference, and furthermore exploring reasoning about the information content of data in a database.
- Explore what may be done in order to make sure that which is provided by a database is information. We currently believe that being a self-consistent representation system is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for this to occur.
- Contribute a step forward to the semantic web development, which aims to transform the present web into a repository of knowledge through inferential power of annotated web pages, and explore how semantic technology may be used to the development of distributed knowledge sharing systems.
Research Focus
Preliminarily, our research work will address some of the following questions:
- How to systematically identify, formulate and reason about representational correspondence between two sets of objects (e.g., a database and the real world) and how this idea may be applied to semantic integration.
- How we could apply semantic information theories to current sophisticated and complex database correspondence between semantically interoperable databases and information systems.
- How to achieve semantic interoperability between related systems within a distributed environment, which is observed to be crucial to sharing information across heterogeneous knowledge representations.
- What is the role that information theories play in Information Systems (IS) mainly in Information Systems Development (ISD)? How to identify and validate the correspondence between Information Flow Theory (IF)–based research and Dretske’s semantic theory of information.
- Are databases in general self consistent? If not then determine whether it is possible to make them so. We currently believe databases are constrained linguistic representation systems, and as a consequence should demonstrate certain kinds of properties concerning “content specificity”, which may shed light on the workings of databases.
- What is the mode of representation of which databases are and does this have any implications for inference over these databases?
- Are information content inclusion relations (IIR) and deductive databases in any way equivalent or linked? Can the IIR framework be extended?
- Can IIR be used to prove the validity of the various ad-hoc processes in use by the database community?