dbTrento: the data and information management group at the University of Trento

The dbTrento data and information management group was established by professors Themis Palpanas and Yannis Velegrakis at the University of Trento in 2006. A lot of work within the group was devoted to the management of entities that form the basis of Dataspaces and of Semantic Web Data. One of these works involved the discovery of the entities that best matched a specification expressed in a keyword query. A classifier was trained to predict the intended semantics of the keyword query and to construct the answer as a ranked set of entities, with the most prominent at higher positions by exploiting attribute frequencies found in query logs. The members of the group developed a mechanism that allows the evolution information to be included explicitly or implicitly in the data, forming an evolution graph. The system allowed the answering of queries formed with a different evolution granularity in mind than the one of the repository in addition to modeling and querying evolution.