A pattern-based approach for deriving approximate and intensional answers

Abstract

A pattern-based approach is proposed to derive the approximate and intensional query answers when the exact answer is unavailable or too time-consuming to generate. The approximate and intensional query answers may be refined if more time is available. Since the pattern-based query processing performs mainly main-memory based manipulations without database access until the last step of generating the final results, it should provide faster response to queries than the conventional query processing in real-time applications.<>