Use Case 1: Article Search

Tony is a student at Birzeit University, He has registered his graduation project with Dr. Mustafa Jarrar, and wants to do some background research about the topics his supervisor was interested in during the last few years. Fortunately, Dr Mustafa has a publications page in his website. However, it would take Tony a lot of time to search for what he wants in a page that contains more than 70 articles, publications, and technical reports.

Using MashQL, Tony was able to retrieve all article titles, abstracts, and their proceeding book title for all articles written by Dr. Mustafa Jarrar after 2003, including that the publisher is not Springer. Also, he could retrieve a link (if exists) to the articles in the result set.

Figure 1: Tony's MashQL Query

Use Case 2: Job Seeking

Bilal is a fresh graduate, he is seeking a job in California State, but he doesn't like to work in coastal cities such as Los Angeles or Torrance. Bilal has to search for this in many websites, each time trying different keyword searches and getting numerous results, which he then has to filter and use only those, relevant to his specific interest.

Now, if Bilal is using MashQL he will be able to add more restrictions to the search process and steer it towards more coherent and efficient results. Naturally, the more restrictions he uses the more specific the results will be to his interest. Moreover, the query is formulated over two different data sources, yahoo and msn, that are use different labels for the same semantic, but the use of OR operator "\" solved the use of different labels.

Bilal's query simply means, give me all job titles, job positions, and if available, company name for all jobs in state "CA" but not in Los Angeles or Torrance cities that were posted after "Apr 08".

Figure 2: Bilal's MashQL Query

To try this use case open our RDFa versions of yahoo jobs and msn jobs, and use them with MashQL.

Use Case 3: Conflicts in West Bank

Ala' is a history student, he is doing a research about conflicts happened in west bank after 1920. Ala' has searched for this in many web sites, but every time he is directed to sites that have general information about west bank cities or even conflicts that happened in the Middle East. He had to read several articles posted on these websites to answer a simple question. And unfortunately, he never got the exact result.

After he used MashQL, he was able to answer his question just in a few clicks. Also, he found that he could retrieve more information that helped him in his research by easily adding some filters to his query.

Figure 3: Ala's MashQL Query