An analytics-aware conceptual model for evolving graphs

Graphs are ubiquitous data structures commonly used to represent highly connected data. Many real-world applications, such as social and biological networks, are modeled as graphs. To answer the surge for graph data management, many graph database solutions were developed. These databases are commonly classified as NoSQL graph databases, and they provide better support for graph data management than their relational counterparts. However, each of these databases implement their own operational graph data model, which differ among the products. Further, there is no commonly agreed conceptual model for graph databases.
In this paper, we introduce a novel conceptual model for graph databases. The aim of our model is to provide analysts with a set of simple, welldefined, and adaptable conceptual components to perform rich analysis tasks. These components take into account the evolving aspect of the graph. Our model is analytics-oriented, flexible and incremental, enabling analysis over evolving graph data. The proposed model provides a typing mechanism for the underlying graph, and formally defines the minimal set of data structures and operators needed to analyze the graph.

Amine Ghrab, Sabri Skhiri, Salim Jouili, and Esteban Zimányi, An Analytics-Aware Conceptual Model For Evolving Graphs, proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Data Warehousing and Knowledge Discovery – DaWak 2013, Prague, Czech Republic, August 2013.

Click here to access the paper.

A Conceptual Model For Evolving Graphs Analysis

Currently EURA NOVA is leading two PhD thesis in collaboration with the CODE/WIT Lab of the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Both thesis are supervised by Professor Esteban Zimànyi from ULB and Sabri Skhiri from EURA NOVA.

The goal of my thesis is to build a multidimensional analysis framework on top of NoSQL data, and most importantly Graphs. Recently our paper entitled: An Analytics-Aware Conceptual Model For Evolving Graphs was accepted for presentation on the 15th International Conference on Data Warehousing and Knowledge Discovery – DaWaK 2013. The conference will be held in Prague, Czech Republic from 26 to 29 August 2013. DaWaK is a reference conference on data warehousing bringing together researcher working on BI related topics.

In this post, I’ll give an overview of the research and contributions of this paper.

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Impossibility of change?

As time goes by and information technologies infrastructures are built, historical decisions accumulate. This accumulation put constraints on architectural options for the future. In other words, the more history you have to manage, the less time you have to make your system progress. And time is money.

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They are renovating the scaffoldings of Brussels’ Law Courts that were put in place 25 years ago.

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Innovative Cross-Pollination

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In the natural world, cross-pollination occurs when a bird or bee delivers one flower’s pollen to a different plant. In the same way, innovation occurs when people bring ideas from one place to another. By its special position within his clients’ organisation, EURA NOVA’s experts are in that way a factor of innovation by simply cross-pollinating EURA NOVA’s knowledge.

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Monthly Buzz – n°2

CONTACT_euranova search

This month was a very interesting month for Tech related news. I would have loved to talk about the new Jolla’s phone and the ‘Other Half’, the XBOX ONE, Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo, BBC’s Perceptive Radio or even Google I/O.
But instead I will write about the rise of Instant Messaging Apps.

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What’s wrong with IT?

© Richard Stallman
© Richard Stallman

Common questions heard around IT:
Is IT a science? an engineering domain? Is it a source of profit or a deep endless hole for money? What’s the map of job types in the domain?

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Three mindsets to change the game: the Walt Disney innovation process

“Innovation can be considered as the transformation of dreams into concrete and tangible things”. Thanks to this point of view, Walt Disney developed unconsciously one of the most efficient innovation process that leads the current success of its well-known company. In 1994, a scientist named Robert Dilts formalized Walt Disney’s innovation process. His work is the root of the process used by EURA NOVA today to foster creativity and innovation.

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Monthly Buzz – n°1

 

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One of the biggest news of the month was the announcement and release of Facebook Home. For those of you who haven’t heard about Facebook Home, it’s an Android Launcher replacement. What does it do? It basically replaces your lock screen and home screen with your Facebook newsfeed. Is it good? Well, apart some privacy concern (your newsfeed appears on your lock screen without the need to unlock the phone), it is as good as your friends are, meaning that if you have a lot of friends who love Hello Kitty, your phone will be an Hello Kitty Phone.
But what Facebook Home shows, is that Android is a very customizable platform that can be tailored to specific needs, even by removing all Google’s services (e.g.: Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s Nook).

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Big Data Paris 2013

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BigData2013

The Big Data Paris 2013 conference was held on April 3rd and 4th. I was quite disappointed by this event. Of course, I knew it was neither a scientific nor an ACM or IEEE event. I was thus coming with a solid mental preparation, ready to see marketing and business presentations.

But what I saw was incredibly far from what I expected. In order to keep this post objective, I will quickly skip the amazingly (Yes, I think this is the right term) poor level of the panel discussions and the talks. Instead, I want to summarize my overall feeling in this post.

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