scholarly journals Analysis of Competing Data Structures: Does Ontological Clarity Produce Better End User Query Performance

2006 ◽  
Vol 7 (8) ◽  
pp. 514-544 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Bowen ◽  
◽  
Robert O'Farrell ◽  
Fiona Rohde ◽  
◽  
...  
2008 ◽  
pp. 2096-2123
Author(s):  
Paul L. Bowen ◽  
Fiona H. Rohde ◽  
Jay Basford

The data structure of an information system can significantly impact the ability of end users to efficiently and effectively retrieve the information they need. This research develops a methodology for evaluating, ex ante, the relative desirability of alternative data structures for end user queries. This research theorizes that the data structure that yields the lowest weighted average complexity for a representative sample of information requests is the most desirable data structure for end user queries. The theory was tested in an experiment that compared queries from two different relational database schemas. As theorized, end users querying the data structure associated with the less complex queries performed better. Complexity was measured using three different Halstead metrics. Each of the three metrics provided excellent predictions of end user performance. This research supplies strong evidence that organizations can use complexity metrics to evaluate, ex ante, the desirability of alternate data structures. Organizations can use these evaluations to enhance the efficient and effective retrieval of information by creating data structures that minimize end user query complexity.


2004 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 45-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul L. Bowen ◽  
Fiona H. Rohde ◽  
Jay Basford

2005 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger S. Debreceny ◽  
Paul L. Bowen

Object-oriented (OO) advocates assert that concepts such as generalization-specialization hierarchies (GSHs) and abstract data types (ADTs) make information systems more usable by increasing the level of abstraction of the data structure. This study analyzes the effects of GSHs and ADTs on the performance of end-users of accounting information systems. Two groups of experimental participants interactively developed Structured Query Language (SQL) queries to answer ten business questions. The control group (n = 28) used data stored in a traditional relational schema. The experimental group (n = 31) used the same data stored in an OO schema that included GSHs and ADTs. Both schemas implemented the same database accounting model of the sales cycle of a hypothetical company. Participants using the higher abstraction (OO) schema with GSHs and ADTs made fewer semantic errors than did participants using the traditional relational schema. The OO participants also required less time to formulate their queries. These results have several important implications. First, relational database vendors should continue, if not accelerate, their efforts to incorporate OO features such as GSHs and ADTs into their database systems. Second, users of accounting information systems need to improve their understanding of the implications of various data structures on their interactive queries. Third, research should investigate the effects of other abstraction mechanisms, including classification/instantiation and aggregation/decomposition, on query performance.


2001 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 195-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
A.F Borthick ◽  
P.L Bowen ◽  
S.T Liew ◽  
F.H Rohde
Keyword(s):  
End User ◽  

Author(s):  
Tsui-Ping Chang

Providing efficient mining algorithm to discover recent frequent XML user query patterns is crucial, as many applications use XML to represent data in their disciplines over the Internet. These recent frequent XML user query patterns can be used to design an index mechanism or cached and thus enhance XML query performance. Several XML query pattern stream mining algorithms have been proposed to record user queries in the system and thus discover the recent frequent XML query patterns over a stream. By using these recent frequent XML query patterns, the query performance of XML data stream is improved. In this paper, user queries are modeled as a stream of XML queries and the recent frequent XML query patterns are thus mined over the stream. Data-stream mining differs from traditional data mining since its input of mining is data streams, while the latter focuses on mining static databases. To facilitate the one-pass mining process, novel schemes (i.e. XstreamCode and XstreamList) are devised in the mining algorithm (i.e. X2StreamMiner) in this paper. X2StreamMiner not only reduces the memory space, but also improves the mining performance. The simulation results also show that X2StreamMiner algorithm is both efficient and scalable. There are two major contributions in this paper. First, the novel schemes are proposed to encode and store the information of user queries in an XML query stream. Second, based on the two schemes, an efficient XML query stream mining algorithm, X2StreamMiner, is proposed to discover the recent frequent XML query patterns.


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