Summarizing Personal Dataspace Based on User Interests

Abstract

A personal dataspace management system (PDSMS) is a platform to manage personal data with various data types. Facing huge volume of heterogeneous personal data and complex relationships between them, it is better for users to start with a simplified, easy-to-read schema and then explore in depth only the relevant schema elements during formulating queries. Existing approaches of database schema summarization neglect user interests, which is very important in a personal dataspace. We propose a framework for building a concise resource summary based on user interests automatically in PDSMS. Our method builds the initial summary by partitioning schema graph according to its linkage information and selecting representative elements based on a novel measure on schema element typicality. Then, user interested degree for schema node is introduced to measure user interests and the initial summary is refined according to user interests. Finally, we evaluate the quality of our resource summary through a comprehensive set of experiments, and results indicate that summaries generated by our system are more effective on reducing user efforts required in formulating queries.