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Top-k queries over web applications

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Abstract

The core logic of web applications that suggest some particular service, such as online shopping, e-commerce etc., is typically captured by Business Processes (BPs). Among all the (maybe infinitely many) possible execution flows of a BP, analysts are often interested in identifying flows that are “most important”, according to some weight metric. The goal of the present paper is to provide efficient algorithms for top-k query evaluation over the possible executions of Business Processes, under some given weight function. Unique difficulties in top-k analysis in this settings stem from (1) the fact that the number of possible execution flows of a given BP is typically very large, or even infinite in presence of recursion and (2) that the weights (e.g., likelihood, monetary cost, etc.) induced by actions performed during the execution (e.g., product purchase) may be inter-dependent (due to probabilistic dependencies, combined discount deals etc.). We exemplify these difficulties, and overcome them to provide efficient algorithms for query evaluation where possible. We also describe in details an application prototype that we have developed for recommending optimal navigation in an online shopping web site that is based on our model and algorithms.

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Notes

  1. Certain EX-flows may have equal weights, which implies that there may be several valid solutions to the problem, in which case we pick one arbitrarily. Similarly, the BP specification may have fewer than \(k\) possible EX-flows, in which case we will simply return the set of all possible flows as an answer.

  2. A similar example can be designed for monotonically decreasing function and top-k flows.

  3. Recall that we are interested in finding the top-k finite, full EX-flows.

  4. Recall that we are currently assuming that \(cWeight\) is history-independent, and relax this assumption in Sect. 3.3.

  5. Note that there may be multiple EX-flows tied as best; in this case, we only claim that at least one of them satisfies the lemma.

  6. Again, there may be multiple such rankings due to ties, and we only claim existence of one satisfying the lemma.

  7. This equality is an equality between EX-flows, corresponding to a node-label, edge-relation and preserving isomorphism.

  8. This weight is uniquely defined, since \(cWeight\) has an history bound of \(b\).

  9. For an EX-flow \(e\), recall that \(\varPi ^{\prime }(e)\) is obtained from \(e\) by replacing each activity name \(a\) in \(e\) by \(\pi ^{\prime }(a)\).

  10. To our knowledge, there are no other published benchmarks for top-k algorithms in the context of eb Applications.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been partially funded by the European Research Council under the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant MoDaS, agreement 291071, by the Israel Ministry of Science, and by the US-Israel Binational Science foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ben Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel

    Daniel Deutch

  2. Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Tova Milo

  3. UC Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

    Neoklis Polyzotis

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  1. Daniel Deutch
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  2. Tova Milo
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  3. Neoklis Polyzotis
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Correspondence to Daniel Deutch.

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Deutch, D., Milo, T. & Polyzotis, N. Top-k queries over web applications. The VLDB Journal 22, 519–542 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00778-012-0303-9

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