Best paper award for Keet and co-authors at the EKAW 2018

Associate Professor Maria Keet is one of the authors of the conference paper that won the Best Paper Award at the 21st International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW2018) held in November 2018 in Nancy, France, out of the 36 papers that were presented at the conference, which were selected from 104 valid papers submitted for peer review (out of 142 abstract submissions).

The topic of the paper is about addressing problems impeding efficient access to data stored in relational databases. The first main contribution is the user evaluation comparing the new Abstract Relational Model (ARM) + SQL with path queries (SQLP) to the regular, well-known, Relational Model (RM) with plain SQL, which shows that both understanding and writing queries with ARM+SQLP is significantly faster whilst maintaining the same level of correctness compared to RM+SQL. The second main contribution described in the paper is the algorithm to ‘bump up’ a plain RM to an ARM, so that then also existing systems can be enhanced to take advantage of the faster querying.

The (by now paywalled) conference proceedings book with the paper is available from Springer’s website; the free camera-ready copy of the paper has the same content.

The work presented in the paper is based on the thesis of Weicong Ma (first author), and the co-authors are supervisors and contributors, being, in alphabetical order, Maria Keet with CS@UCT, and Wayne Oldford, David Toman, and Grant Weddell from the University of Waterloo in Canada.