Best Doctoral Symposium Paper Award at ESWC 2024

Our PhD student Ruben Eschauzier received the Best Dotoral Symposium Paper award for his paper Personalized Query Engine Optimization for Link Traversal-based Query Processing over Structured Decentralized Environments at ESWC 2024.

About the paper

The scale of decentralization envisioned for the presently centralized web requires querying approaches that can query numerous small data sources instead of a few large ones. Link Traversal-based Query Processing (LTQP) is a promising candidate for querying highly decentralized environments that executes queries with zero knowledge of the queried data and discovers data sources on the fly. However, as the engine does not know in advance what data will be queried, creating an optimized query plan before executing the query is challenging. Presently, LTQP is employed for client-side querying, where one engine instance services a single client. Despite this, current engines do not utilize client-specific engine query usage patterns to implement personalized query optimization algorithms. This paper will describe the proposed research approach for implementing personalized query optimization techniques, such as caching or learned query optimizers, for LTQP. The objective is to improve query optimization algorithms through the analysis of historical query engine usage, instead of depending on additional prior information. Personalized optimization will be based on existing work in SPARQL optimization literature and fundamental database theory, adapted to LTQP, and aimed at repeating their success in reducing query execution time. As a result, query engines will gain the capability to query large decentralized environments, enabling applications to function within this emerging decentralized web landscape.

Read the full paper here.

About the conference

The Extended Semantic Web Conference is a major venue for discussing the latest scientific results and technology innovations around semantic technologies. Building on its past success, ESWC is seeking to broaden its focus to span other relevant related research areas in which Web semantics plays an important role.

The goal of the Semantic Web is to create a Web of knowledge and services in which the semantics of content is made explicit and content is linked to both other content and services allowing novel applications to combine content from heterogeneous sites in unforeseen ways and support enhanced matching between users needs and content. This network of knowledge-based functionality will weave together a large network of human knowledge, and make this knowledge machine-processable to support intelligent behaviour by machines. Creating such an interlinked Web of knowledge which spans unstructured text, structured data as well as multimedia content and services requires the collaboration of many disciplines, including but not limited to: Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Databases and Information Systems, Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, Multimedia, Distributed Systems, Social Networks, Web Engineering, and Web Science.