Abstract: A method and system for constructing a text summarization. At least one domain ontology that includes a set of concepts is selected. A user profile indicative of a user's interests is defined in terms of the ontology concepts. A document's relevance to the user is determined based upon the user profile. If the document is relevant, at least a portion of the ontology is used to extract concepts from the document. The degree of match between the extracted concepts and the user profile concepts is determined and the document text summary is generated if the degree of match exceeds a predetermined threshold. Generating the summary may include selecting sentences based on the concepts in the user profile, ranking the selected sentences by relevance to the user profile, selecting sentences for inclusion in the document text summary based upon the ranking, and merging the selected sentences into the document text summary.

Abstract: Our invention guarantees global serializability by preventing multidatabase transactions from being serialized in different ways at the participating local database systems (LDBS). In one embodiment tickets are used to inform the MDBS of the relative serialization order of the subtransactions of each global transactions at each LDBS. A ticket is a (logical) timestamp whose value is stored as a regular data item in each LDBS. Each substransaction of a global transaction is required to issue the take-a-ticket operations which consists of reading the value of the ticket (i.e., read ticket) and incrementing it (i.e., write (ticket+1)) through regular data manipulation operations. Only the subtransactions of global transactions take tickets. When different global transactions issue subtransactions at a local database, each subtransaction will include the take-a-ticket operations. Therefore, the ticket values associated with each global subtransaction at the MDBS reflect the local serialization order at each LDBS.