Exemplar Queries: Give me an Example of What You Need

Summary: Introduces exemplar queries: a user query is an example of data to capture intent beyond matches. Formal semantics; graph-based implementation with exact optimized and prune-based approximate solutions; tests on synthetic and real data show practicality. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 11102
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2014
Pagerank: 9.5243334e-05
Overall Rank: 1,897 | 86.99%
DOI: 10.14778/2732269.2732273

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Davide Mottin (University of Trento)
2. Matteo Lissandrini (University of Trento)
3. Yannis Velegrakis (University of Trento)
4. Themis Palpanas (Paris Descartes University)

BibTeX Citation

@article{mottin_vldb14,
        title = {{Exemplar Queries: Give me an Example of What You Need}},
        author = {Mottin, Davide and Lissandrini, Matteo and Velegrakis, Yannis and Palpanas, Themis},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '14},
        volume = {7},
        number = {5},
        pages = {365},
        doi = {10.14778/2732269.2732273},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/2732269.2732273},
        year = {2014}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 14 of 14 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
3,056	VIIQ: Auto-Suggestion Enabled Visual Interface for Interactive Graph Query Formulation	2015	VLDB	7.8075329e-05
3,604	SLQ: A User-friendly Graph Querying System	2014	SIGMOD	7.2666079e-05
4,140	Interactive Mapping Specification with Exemplar Tuples	2017	SIGMOD	6.8765495e-05
4,420	Optimization for Active Learning-based Interactive Database Exploration	2019	VLDB	6.7132724e-05
4,511	Juneau: Data Lake Management for Jupyter	2019	VLDB	6.6517623e-05
5,130	Natural Language Data Management and Interfaces: Recent Development and Open Challenges	2017	SIGMOD	6.354484e-05
7,837	Searching with XQ: the eXemplar Query Search Engine	2014	SIGMOD	5.5344136e-05
9,268	Knowledge Exploration Using Tables on the Web	2017	VLDB	5.295208e-05
9,368	SQuID: Semantic Similarity-Aware Query Intent Discovery	2018	SIGMOD	5.2778771e-05
10,037	Graph Exploration: From Users to Large Graphs	2017	SIGMOD	5.1729561e-05
11,577	Fast Dataset Search with Earth Mover's Distance	2022	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,787	SPARQL Rewriting: Towards Desired Results	2020	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,830	Demonstration of a Multiresolution Schema Mapping System	2019	CIDR	5.093636e-05
11,854	Answering Why-questions by Exemplars in Attributed Graphs	2019	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 8 of 8 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
177	Graph Indexing: A Frequent Structure-based Approach	2004	SIGMOD	0.00027100548
228	Reference Reconciliation in Complex Information Spaces	2005	SIGMOD	0.00023941271
352	On Graph Query Optimization in Large Networks	2010	VLDB	0.00020375193
1,394	Neighborhood Based Fast Graph Search in Large Networks	2011	SIGMOD	0.0001093153
2,285	NeMa: Fast Graph Search with Label Similarity	2013	VLDB	8.8052998e-05
3,651	Keyword Search over Relational Databases: A Metadata Approach	2011	SIGMOD	7.2249652e-05
4,076	A Probabilistic Optimization Framework for the Empty-Answer Problem	2013	VLDB	6.9221203e-05
13,637	The Trento Big Data Platform for Public Administration and Large Companies: Use cases and Opportunities	2013	VLDB	-

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#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	8,936	Toward Scalable Keyword Search over Relational Data	2010	VLDB
2	4,372	Schemaless and Structureless Graph Querying	2014	VLDB
3	11,854	Answering Why-questions by Exemplars in Attributed Graphs	2019	SIGMOD
4	4,703	Finding Patterns in a Knowledge Base using Keywords to Compose Table Answers	2014	VLDB
5	1,542	Keyword Proximity Search in Complex Data Graphs	2008	SIGMOD
6	7,703	Constrained Optimalities in Query Personalization	2005	SIGMOD
7	8,358	Exploring the Data Wilderness through Examples	2019	SIGMOD
8	8,223	Query Expansion Based on Clustered Results	2011	VLDB
9	8,329	Understanding Queries in a Search Database System	2010	PODS
10	7,837	Searching with XQ: the eXemplar Query Search Engine	2014	SIGMOD