Roxana will be presenting recent results in the annotations field:

Floris Geerts, Anastasios Kementsietsidis, Diego Milano. "MONDRIAN: Annotating and querying databases through colors and blocks". ICDE'06

Abstract:

Annotations play a central role in the curation of scientific databases. Despite their importance, data formats and schemas are not designed to manage the increasing variety of annotations. Moreover, DBMS’s often lack support for storing and querying annotations. Furthermore, annotations and data
are only loosely coupled. This paper introduces an annotation-oriented data model for the manipulation and querying of both data and annotations. In particular, the model allows for the specification of annotations on sets of values and for effectively querying the information on their association. We
use the concept of block to represent an annotated set of values. Different colors applied to the blocks represent different annotations. We introduce a color query language for our model and prove it to be complete on the class of color (annotated) databases. We present MONDRIAN, a prototype
implementing the proposed annotation mechanism, and we conduct experiments that investigate the set of parameters which influence the evaluation cost for color queries.