Concert Planning Demonstration

SeCo includes the Liquid Query paradigm, that a set of interaction primitives that let users make questions and explore results spanning over multiple sources, thus getting closer and closer to the sought information.

Demonstration Goal

This demonstration aims at showcasing all the available interaction options offered by Liquid Query. Liquid Query is the part of the SeCo framework that deals with the user interactions, at the purpose of granting exploratory capabilities over the data. Several exploratory options are offered: the user specifies the an initial query and then reads and manipulates the search results, by asking for more information, re-ranking the list, changing the data visualization options, clustering results, and so on.

As an example, the demonstration features the interaction with backend search services based on YQL (Yahoo! Query Language), a language and a platform that let Web applications access Web data through SQL-like statements

Running Example

To demonstrate the liquid query interactions, we implemented a SeCo application assuming that an end user wants to plan a leisure trip, where she wants to attend a concert (e.g., Jazz, Rock, Pop, etc.) close to a specified location and considering also availability of good, close-by hotels. Users select the best answers and then inspect additional properties which are reachable from such answers; furthermore, they can additionally look for restaurants close to the candidate concert location, and can also be interested in co-located events, i.e., further events scheduled in the same days and location with respect to the first one.

The protoype uses as data back-end the Yahoo! Query Language platform (YQL). In details, the prototype makes use of:

• the table
• the table
• the table

The reader can easily verify the current status of the YQL engine/services by querying one of the aforementioned service directly on the YQL console.

 

Watch the demonstration video