Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

The requested funding will provide for renewing the equipment in the Data Management & Mining Lab in UBC and will support our research in: (1) Querying and Mining over Large Social Content Sites; (2) Keyword Search over Data Warehouses; and (3) Analysis of genomics and proteomics data. (1) Traditional web search does not distinguish between content-only sites such as news sites, and social sites such as facebook. Web 2.0 has been spurring a general trend toward the integration of these two kinds of sites. We envision a future where querying specialized domain-specific sites will increasingly offer an attractive alternative to generic web search. We will develop the necessary models, languages, data mining algorithms, and optimization techniques for enabling high quality user interaction with large social content sites. (2) Data warehouses (DW) have emerged as a successful multi-billion dollar industry, enabling analysis of enterprise data from a consolidated, organizational perspective. However, user interaction is made hard by the complex schema of a DW and the rigid structured query language MDX. We plan to develop strategies and algorithms for supporting keyword search queries over data warehouses and a framework called KOOLAP (Keyword-Oriented OLAP) for efficiently supporting keyword search over data warehouses for extracting business intelligence. (3) Biomarkers have applications to diagnosis/prognosis of disease and for assessing the health states of animals and plants. Advancements in the fields of genomics and proteomics have revolutionized novel biomarker discovery with new tools for high throughput strategies. We will develop a comprehensive framework for using large amounts of genomics and proteomics data for identifying biomarkers and signatures.