Large-scale adoption of electronic healthcare applications requires semantic interoperability. The new proposals propose an advanced (multi-level) DBMS architecture for repository services for health records of patients. These also require query interfaces at multiple levels and at the level of semi-skilled users. In this regard, a high-level user interface for querying the new form of standardized Electronic Health Records system has been examined in this study. It proposes a step-by-step graphical query interface to allow semi-skilled users to write queries. Its aim is to decrease user effort and communication ambiguities, and increase user friendliness.

We present a model checking approach to the rationale, implementation, and applications of a query language for location-based services. Such query mechanisms are necessary so that users, objects, and/or services can effectively benefit from the location-awareness of their surrounding environment. The underlying data model is founded on a symbolic model of space organized in a tree structure. Once extended to a semantic model for modal logic, we regard location query processing as a model checking problem, and thus define location queries as hybrid logic-based formulas. Our approach is unique to existing research because it explores the connection between location models and query processing in ubiquitous computing systems, relies on a sound theoretical basis, and provides modal logic-based query mechanisms for expressive searches over a decentralized data structure. A prototype implementation is also presented and will be discussed.

Decentralized XML databases are often used in Electronic Commerce (EC) business models such as e-brokers on the Web. To flexibly model such applications, we need a modeling language for EC business processes. To this end, we have adopted a query language approach and have designed a query language, called XBML, for decentralized XML databases used in EC businesses. In this paper, we explain and validate the functionality of XBML by specifying e-broker business models and describe the implementation of the XBML server, focusing on the distributed query processing.

To provide users with database-like query interfaces on HTML data, several systems have been developed to extract structures from HTML pages. Among them, tree-like structures and path expressions are the most popular modeling and navigating tools, respectively. Although path expressions are straightforward in representing top-down search patterns, they provide very limited help in representing bottom-up and in-breadth search patterns. In this paper, a lattice model is proposed to store Web data. The model provides an integrated mechanism to store text, linking information, HTML hierarchy, and sequence order of HTML data. By incorporating lattice operators with comprehension syntax, we show that the query language can represent top-down, bottom-up, and in-breadth searching patterns with uniform operators. It will be also shown that lattice comprehensions can represent all operators of path expressions, except Kleen closure.

The evolution of heterogeneous and autonomous databases research has been slow compared to other areas of research. Part of the problem resides in the fact that bridging data semantics has been a difficult problem. Sharing data among disparate databases has mostly been achieved through some form of manual schema integration. The complexity of making autonomous heterogeneous databases smoothly interoperate is dependent on addressing two major issues. The first issue to address is what adequate levels of autonomy databases are guaranteed to keep. The second issue to address is what overhead cost is required to bridge database heterogeneity. The complexity of these two issues are closely dependent on how scalable multidatabase systems are. In this paper we introduce the FINDIT architecture which uses information meta-types to provide a basis for such an organization and, consequently, provides a platform for inter-operability. A distinction is made between the information and inter-node relationship spaces to achieve scalability. Tassili language primitives are used for the incremental building of dynamic inter-node relationships based upon usage considerations.