Cooperative Query Processing

The process of choosing a Senior High School(SHS)to attend by Junior High School(JHS)students is an important phenomenon in the life of both students and parents in Ghana.The process of choosing schools marks an important step in Computerized School Selection and Placement System(CSSPS).Applicants are required to pick 4 schools out of 836 senior high schools.The major setback for these applicants is getting necessary information(such as available courses,accommodation types available,WASSCE pass rate,location and address)about these schools in other to enhance their decision making.The overall objective of this thesis is to present a methodology,along with its implementation in developing a cooperative query processing database system to assist JHS students in schools' selection during CSSPS application process.The objectives can be classified into two parts.First,creating a relational database management system to organize and store vital information of senior high schools in Ghana.Second,enhancing the functionality of the relational database system to a cooperative query processing database system with an intelligent interface.A Cooperative Query Answering(CQA)database generates results more than what is usually expected from traditional database systems.The addition of an intelligent interface allows users to formulate and submit queries using their natural language-English.Thus,users of the system do not need to be technically proficient in Structured Query Language(SQL)in other to use the system.The methodology developed in this research considers only the semantic aspect of user's query and do not consider linguistic aspects,such as natural language representation.In the final section of this research,we discuss the implementation issues of the proposed methodology and developed system.We further explain the architectural choices made in implementing the system and the results of our extensive experiments.