In this section we present the Faceted Query Engine: a system that implements browsing and querying facilities for faceted hierarchies. Subsection 5.1 describes simple exploration of the data: browsing the hierarchy, listing elements of entity sets, looking up detailed information about entities, and exploring relationships between entities using links.
Subsequent subsections focus on the query facilities of our system that allow for more sophisticated data analysis than can be achieved by browsing alone. EntityAlgebra, our query language for faceted hierarchies, defines operators useful for such analysis. The language is fully compositional: each operator acts on one or more entity sets, and produces a new entity set as a result; this resulting entity set can be saved and/or used as input to subsequent operators. All queries are posed through interactions with the graphical user interface.
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URL: http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue21/3/queryengine.html
Last updated: Mon April 30 2007