International audience

This paper provides a multi-perspective vision of diversity and inclusion (D&I) projects aiming to promote equity in organisations seeking to build virtuous contexts where people can achieve positive professional and personal objectives. It introduces the understanding of D&I, best practices and outcomes of projects promoted in multicultural organisations, including academia, universities and research centres (Politecnico di Torino, university education in France and the French CNRS) and in leading international companies, namely Accenture and Nestlé. The paper gathers and extends the discussion and ideas exchanged in the D&I panel of the conference ADBIS-2022.

With new emerging technologies, such as satellites and drones, archaeologists collect data over large areas. However, it becomes difficult to process such data in time. Archaeological data also have many different formats (images, texts, sensor data) and can be structured, semi-structured and unstructured. Such variety makes data difficult to collect, store, manage, search and analyze effectively. A few approaches have been proposed, but none of them covers the full data lifecycle nor provides an efficient data management system. Hence, we propose the use of a data lake to provide centralized data stores to host heterogeneous data, as well as tools for data quality checking, cleaning, transformation and analysis. In this paper, we propose a generic, flexible and complete data lake architecture. Our metadata management system exploits goldMEDAL, which is the most generic metadata model currently available. Finally, we detail the concrete implementation of this architecture dedicated to an archaeological project.

Using data warehouses to analyse multidimensional data is a significant task in company decision-making. The need for analyzing data stored in different data warehouses generates the requirement of merging them into one integrated data warehouse. The data warehouse merging process is composed of two steps: matching multidimensional components and then merging them. Current approaches do not take all the particularities of multidimensional data warehouses into account, e.g., only merging schemata, but not instances; or not exploiting hierarchies nor fact tables. Thus, in this paper, we propose an automatic merging approach for star schema-modeled data warehouses that works at both the schema and instance levels. We also provide algorithms for merging hierarchies, dimensions and facts. Eventually, we implement our merging algorithms and validate them with the use of both synthetic and benchmark datasets.

With the rise of big data, business intelligence had to find solutions for managing even greater data volumes and variety than in data warehouses, which proved ill-adapted. Data lakes answer these needs from a storage point of view, but require managing adequate metadata to guarantee an efficient access to data. Starting from a multidimensional metadata model designed for an industrial heritage data lake presenting a lack of schema evolutivity, we propose in this paper to use ensemble modeling, and more precisely a data vault, to address this issue. To illustrate the feasibility of this approach, we instantiate our metadata conceptual model into relational and document-oriented logical and physical models, respectively. We also compare the physical models in terms of metadata storage and query response time.

Cloud business intelligence is an increasingly popular choice to deliver decision support capabilities via elastic, pay-per-use resources. However, data security issues are one of the top concerns when dealing with sensitive data. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for securing cloud data warehouses by flexible verifiable secret sharing, fVSS. Secret sharing encrypts and distributes data over several cloud service providers, thus enforcing data privacy and availability. fVSS addresses four shortcomings in existing secret sharing-based approaches. First, it allows refreshing the data warehouse when some service providers fail. Second, it allows on-line analysis processing. Third, it enforces data integrity with the help of both inner and outer signatures. Fourth, it helps users control the cost of cloud warehousing by balancing the load among service providers with respect to their pricing policies. To illustrate fVSS' efficiency, we thoroughly compare it with existing secret sharing-based approaches with respect to security features, querying power and data storage and computing costs.

With XML becoming a ubiquitous language for data interoperability purposes in various domains, efficiently querying XML data is a critical issue. This has lead to the design of algebraic frameworks based on tree-shaped patterns akin to the tree-structured data model of XML. Tree patterns are graphic representations of queries over data trees. They are actually matched against an input data tree to answer a query. Since the turn of the 21st century, an astounding research effort has been focusing on tree pattern models and matching optimization (a primordial issue). This paper is a comprehensive survey of these topics, in which we outline and compare the various features of tree patterns. We also review and discuss the two main families of approaches for optimizing tree pattern matching, namely pattern tree minimization and holistic matching. We finally present actual tree pattern-based developments, to provide a global overview of this significant research topic.

Business Intelligence plays an important role in decision making. Based on data warehouses and Online Analytical Processing, a business intelligence tool can be used to analyze complex data. Still, summarizability issues in data warehouses cause ineffective analyses that may become critical problems to businesses. To settle this issue, many researchers have studied and proposed various solutions, both in relational and XML data warehouses. However, they find difficulty in evaluating the performance of their proposals since the available benchmarks lack complex hierarchies. In order to contribute to summarizability analysis, this paper proposes an extension to the XML warehouse benchmark (XWeB) with complex hierarchies. The benchmark enables us to generate XML data warehouses with scalable complex hierarchies as well as summarizability processing. We experimentally demonstrated that complex hierarchies can definitely be included into a benchmark dataset, and that our benchmark is able to compare two alternative approaches dealing with summarizability issues.

The dramatic proliferation of sophisticated cyber attacks, in conjunction with the ever growing use of Internet-based services and applications, is nowadays becoming a great concern in any organization. Among many efficient security solutions proposed in the literature to deal with this evolving threat, ensemble approaches, a particular family of data mining, have proven very successful in designing high performance intrusion detection systems (IDSs) resting on the mutual combination of multiple classifiers. However, the strength of ensemble systems depends heavily on the methods to generate and combine individual classifiers. In this thread, we propose a novel design method to generate a robust ensemble-based IDS. In our approach, individual classifiers are built using both the input feature space and additional features exploited from k-means clustering. In addition, the ensemble combination is calculated based on the classification ability of classifiers on different local data regions defined in form of k-means clustering. Experimental results prove that our solution is superior to several well-known methods.

Many applications log a large amount of events continuously. Extracting interesting knowledge from logged events is an emerging active research area in data mining. In this context, we propose an approach for mining frequent events and association rules from logged events in XML format. This approach is composed of two-main phases: I) constructing a novel tree structure called Frequency XML-based Tree (FXT), which contains the frequency of events to be mined; II) querying the constructed FXT using XQuery to discover frequent itemsets and association rules. The FXT is constructed with a single-pass over logged data. We implement the proposed algorithm and study various performance issues. The performance study shows that the algorithm is efficient, for both constructing the FXT and discovering association rules.

With the multiplication of XML data sources, many XML data warehouse models have been proposed to handle data heterogeneity and complexity in a way relational data warehouses fail to achieve. However, XML-native database systems currently suffer from limited performances, both in terms of manageable data volume and response time. Fragmentation helps address both these issues. Derived horizontal fragmentation is typically used in relational data warehouses and can definitely be adapted to the XML context. However, the number of fragments produced by classical algorithms is difficult to control. In this paper, we propose the use of a k-means-based fragmentation approach that allows to master the number of fragments through its k parameter. We experimentally compare its efficiency to classical derived horizontal fragmentation algorithms adapted to XML data warehouses and show its superiority.

This paper explores the effect that changing access patterns has on the performance of database management systems. Changes in access patterns play an important role in determining the efficiency of key performance optimization techniques, such as dynamic clustering, prefetching, and buffer replacement. However, all existing benchmarks or evaluation frameworks produce static access patterns in which objects are always accessed in the same order repeatedly. Hence, we have proposed the Dynamic Evaluation Framework (DEF) that simulates access pattern changes using configurable styles of change. DEF has been designed to be open and fully extensible (e.g., new access pattern change models can be added easily). In this paper, we instantiate DEF into the Dynamic Object Evaluation Framework (DoEF) which is designed for object databases, that is, object-oriented or object-relational databases, such as multimedia databases or most XML databases. The capabilities of DoEF have been evaluated by simulating the execution of four different dynamic clustering algorithms. The results confirm our analysis that flexible conservative reclustering is the key in determining a clustering algorithm’s ability to adapt to changes in access pattern. These results show the effectiveness of DoEF at determining the adaptability of each dynamic clustering algorithm to changes in access pattern in a simulation environment. In a second set of experiments, we have used DoEF to compare the performance of two real-life object stores: Platypus and SHORE. DoEF has helped to reveal the poor swapping performance of Platypus.

With the wide development of databases in general and data warehouses in particular, it is important to reduce the tasks that a database administrator must perform manually. The aim of auto-administrative systems is to administrate and adapt themselves automatically without loss (or even with a gain) in performance. The idea of using data mining techniques to extract useful knowledge for administration from the data themselves has existed for some years. However, little research has been achieved. This idea nevertheless remains a very promising approach, notably in the field of data warehousing, where queries are very heterogeneous and cannot be interpreted easily. The aim of this study is to search for a way of extracting useful knowledge from stored data themselves to automatically apply performance optimization techniques, and more particularly indexing techniques. We have designed a tool that extracts frequent itemsets from a given workload to compute an index configuration that helps optimizing data access time. The experiments we performed showed that the index configurations generated by our tool allowed performance gains of 15% to 25% on a test database and a test data warehouse.

We present in this paper a generic object-oriented benchmark (OCB: the Object Clustering Benchmark) that has been designed to evaluate the performances of Object-Oriented Databases (OODBs), and more specifically the performances of clustering policies within OODBs. OCB is generic because its sample database may be customized to fit any of the databases introduced by the main existing benchmarks, e.g., OO1 (Object Operation 1) or OO7. The first version of OCB was purposely clustering-oriented due to a clustering-oriented workload, but OCB has been thoroughly extended to be able to suit other purposes. Eventually, OCB’s code is compact and easily portable. OCB has been validated through two implementations: one within the O2 OODB and another one within the Texas persistent object store. The performances of a specific clustering policy called DSTC (Dynamic, Statistical, Tunable Clustering) have also been evaluated with OCB.