bio

I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of West Georgia. My personal page at West Georgia contains my current class schedule, office hours, and other teaching related information.

I received my Ph.D. from Georgia Tech's College of Computing where I was part of the Distributed Data Intensive Systems Lab.

rockdj@cc.gatech.edu .::. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0280 .::. 404.385.2585

research interests

My research interests lie in the areas of database systems and mobile computing. I am especially interested in the application of database technologies to new domains such as the Internet and bioinformatics.

LLNL Bioinformatics Project

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory DataFoundry Bioinformatics Project seeks to automatically unify the quickly proliferating BLAST data sources behind an integrated user interface. Research challenges include describing the data sources of interest, identifying relevant sources, and determining the inputs, output, and control flow characteristics of the identified sources.

Page Digest

The Page Digest is a mechanism for efficient storage and processing of Web documents. The Page Digest design encourages a clean separation of the structural elements of Web documents from their content. Its encoding transformation is invertible without introducing significant additional cost or complexity to normal document parsing. Compared to using standard DOM implementations, our initial experimental results show that Page Digest encoding can provide an order of magnitude speedup when traversing a Web document or comparing two arbitrary Web documents.

We have examined the potential benefits of using Page Digest in other large-scale Web Services such as Web Search Software, Web Data Extraction Services, and Automatic Fragment Detection for Dynamic Content Caching. Our experimental results show that change detection using the Page Digest operates in linear time, offering 75% improvement in execution performance when compared with popular existing change detection and difference systems. In addition, the Page Digest format reduces the tag name redundancy found in Web documents, which provides up to a 50% reduction in the document size without employing data compression techniques.

recent publications

• James Caverlee, Ling Liu, and Daniel Rocco. Discovering and Ranking Web Services with BASIL: A Personalized Approach with Biased Focus. In proceedings of the International Conference on Service Oriented Computing 2004.
• Anne H. H. Ngu, Daniel Rocco, Terence Critchlow, and David Buttler. Automatic Discovery and Inferencing Of Complex Bioinformatics Web Interfaces. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Technical Report UCRL-JRNL-201611, 2003.
• James Caverlee, Ling Liu, Daniel Rocco. Discovering and Ranking Data Intensive Web Services: A Source-Biased Approach. Georgia Institute of Technology CERCS technical report GIT-CERCS-03-26, 2003. (abstract, pdf)
• Daniel Rocco, Terence Critchlow. Automatic discovery and classification of bioinformatics Web sources. Bioinformatics. 2003 Oct 12;19(15):1927-33.
• Daniel Rocco, David Buttler, Ling Liu. Page Digest for Large-Scale Web Services. In Proc. IEEE Conference on E-Commerce, 2003. (pdf)
• Ling Liu, David Buttler, Terence Critchlow, Wei Han, Henrique Paques, Calton Pu, Daniel Rocco. BioZoom: Exploiting Source-Capability Information for Integrated Access to Multiple Bioinformatics Data Sources. In Proc. of 3rd IEEE Symposium on Bioinfomatics and Bioengineering, 2003. (pdf)
• David Buttler, Matthew Coleman, Terence Critchlow, Renato Fileto, Wei Han, Calton Pu, Daniel Rocco, Li Xiong. Querying Multiple Bioinformatics Information Sources: Can Semantic Web Research Help? SIGMOD Record, Vol 31, No. 4, December 2002.
• Rocco, D. and Critchlow, T. Discovery and Classification of Bioinformatics Web Services. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Technical Report UCRL-JC-149963, 2002. (pdf)