Abstract
Being decades of study, the usability of database systems have received more attention in recent years. Now it is especially able to explain missing objects in a query result, which is called “why-not” questions, and is the focus of concern. This paper studies the problem of answering why-not questions on KNN queries. In our real life, many users would like to use KNN queries to investigate the surrounding circumstances. Nevertheless, they often feel disappointed when finding the result not including their expected objects. In this paper, we use the query refinement approach to resolve the problem. Given the original KNN query and a set of missing objects as input, our algorithm offer a refined KNN query that includes the missing objects to the user. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed optimizations and algorithms.
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Acknowledgements
This research is funded by NSFC (61773167) and the Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai (17ZR1444900). The authors are grateful to the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments that significantly improved the quality of this manuscript. Finally, Zhong wants to thank professor Lin for his enlightening suggestions, in addition, a special thanks to all the “sos” members for their support and understanding throughout the years.
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Zhefan Zhong received the BE degree in 2011 and is currently a PhD candidate of computer science in East China Normal University, China. His research interests include location-based services, spatial databases, especially the optimization of query processing in sophisticated databases.
Xin Lin received the PhD degree in computer science and engineering from Zhejiang University, China. He is currently a professor in the Department of Computer Science, East China Normal University. His research interests include location-based services, spatial databases, and privacy-aware compute.
Liang He is a professor in the Department of Computer Science, East China Normal University, China. His current research interests mainly lie in big data analysis and knowledge processing. In the past years, he has published more than 70 research papers in international conferences and journals.
Jing Yang received the PhD degree in East China Normal University (ECNU), China and then works in ECNU up to now. Her research interests include semantic information processing and crowd-sourcing. In the past years, she has published many papers in international conferences and journals.
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Zhong, Z., Lin, X., He, L. et al. Answering why-not questions on KNN queries. Front. Comput. Sci. 13, 1062–1071 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-018-7074-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-018-7074-4