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 El Hassan Abdelwahed
Ladjel Bellatreche · Mattéo Golfarelli
Dominique Méry · Carlos Ordonez (Eds.)
LNCS 11163

Model and
Data Engineering
8th International Conference, MEDI 2018
Marrakesh, Morocco, October 24–26, 2018
Proceedings

123
Lecture Notes in Computer Science 11163
Commenced Publication in 1973
Founding and Former Series Editors:
Gerhard Goos, Juris Hartmanis, and Jan van Leeuwen

Editorial Board
David Hutchison
Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
Takeo Kanade
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Josef Kittler
University of Surrey, Guildford, UK
Jon M. Kleinberg
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Friedemann Mattern
ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
John C. Mitchell
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
Moni Naor
Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
C. Pandu Rangan
Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India
Bernhard Steffen
TU Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany
Demetri Terzopoulos
University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Doug Tygar
University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
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Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrücken, Germany
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/7408
El Hassan Abdelwahed Ladjel Bellatreche
•

Mattéo Golfarelli Dominique Méry

•

Carlos Ordonez (Eds.)

Model and
Data Engineering
8th International Conference, MEDI 2018
Marrakesh, Morocco, October 24–26, 2018
Proceedings

123
Editors
El Hassan Abdelwahed Dominique Méry
Cadi Ayyad University University of Lorraine
Marrakesh, Morocco Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy, France
Ladjel Bellatreche Carlos Ordonez
LIAS/ISAE-ENSMA University of Houston
Futuroscope Chasseneuil Cedex Houston, TX, USA
France
Mattéo Golfarelli
University of Bologna
Cesena, Italy

ISSN 0302-9743 ISSN 1611-3349 (electronic)

Lecture Notes in Computer Science
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 Preface

The International Conference on Model and Data Engineering (MEDI) is an interna-

tional forum for the dissemination of research accomplishments on database modeling
and data management. Specifically, MEDI provides a stimulating environment for the
presentation of research on database models, database theory, data processing, database
systems technology, and advanced database-oriented applications. This international
scientific event, initiated by researchers from Euro-Mediterranean countries, also aims
to promote the creation of North-South scientific networks, projects, as well as
faculty/student exchanges. This year, 2018, marks the 8th edition of MEDI, making it a
well-established conference. Our 8th edition, was held on Marrakesh (Morocco),
followed the success of the Óbidos (Portugal, 2011), Poitiers (France, 2012),
Armantea (Italy, 2013), Larnaca (Cyprus 2014), Island of Rhodes (Greece 2015),
Almería (Spain, 2016), and Barcelona (Spain, 2017).
MEDI 2018 received 86 submissions from 36 countries around the world. The
selection process was rigorous, where each paper received at least 4 reviews. The
Program Committee, after careful discussions, decided to accept 23 full papers and 4
short papers, yielding an acceptance rate of 27% for full papers and 32% overall.
Accepted papers covered broad research areas on both theoretical systems and practical
aspects. Some trends found in accepted papers include requirement engineering,
reverse engineering, advanced modeling for Cloud Systems, IOT applications, query
processing in emerging hardware, parallel processing, Semantic Web, graph databases,
sentiment analysis, cyber physical systems, formal methods, and NoSQL databases.
We are honored to have two distinguished guests as keynote speakers: Georg
Gottlob, Professor of Informatics at Oxford University, UK, and a Fellow of St John’s
College, giving a talk entitled “Data Science with Vadalog: Bridging Machine
Learning and Reasoning,” and Mohamed Mosbah, Professor of Computer Science at
LABRI, University of Bordeaux, France, whose talk is entitled: “Modeling Distributed
Algorithms by Local Computations with Applications.”
The EasyChair conference management system was set up for MEDI 2018, sup-
porting submission, review, and volume edition processes. We acknowledge that it is
an outstanding tool for the academic community.
We would like to thank all the authors who submitted their work to MEDI 2018. We
are grateful to the Program Committee members and external reviewers for their
high-quality reviews and discussions. Finally, we wish to thank the Organizing
Committee members for their continuous support.
Finally, MEDI 2018 has received financial support of several sponsors, among
them: Cadi Ayyad University (UCA), Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (UM6P),
Faculty of Sciences Semlalia Marrakech (FSSM), and Laboratoire d’Ingénierie des
Systèmes Informatiques (LISI). Many thanks for their contribution.
For conference attendants, we hope they enjoyed the technical program, informal
meetings, and interaction with colleagues from all over the world; and of course, we are
VI Preface

confident they enjoyed the exciting city of Marrakesh, Morocco. For readers of these
proceedings, we hope these papers are interesting and they give you ideas for future
research.

July 2018 El Hassan Abdelwahed

Ladjel Bellatreche
Matteo Golfarelli
Dominique Méry
Carlos Ordonez
 Organization

General Co-chairs
El-Hassan Abdelwahed Cadi Ayyad University, Morocco
Ladjel Bellatreche LIAS/ENSMA, France

Program Committee Co-chairs

Matteo Golfarelli University of Bologna, Italy
Dominique Méry LORIA - Université de Lorraine, France
Carlos Ordonez University of Houston, USA

Organizing Committee Members

My Ahmed El Kiram Cadi Ayyad University, Morocco
Souad Chraibi Cadi Ayyad University, Morocco
Essaid El Bachari Cadi Ayyad University, Morocco
Zahir Jihad Cadi Ayyad University, Morocco
Sana Nouzri Cadi Ayyad University, Morocco
Tarik Agouti Cadi Ayyad University, Morocco
Issam Qaffou Cadi Ayyad University, Morocco
My El Mehdi Bouhamidi Cadi Ayyad University, Morocco

Program Committee
El-Hassan Abdelwahed Cadi Ayyad University, Morocco
Alberto Abello Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain
Yamine Ait Ameur IRIT/INPT-ENSEEIHT, France
Idir Ait Sadoune LRI - CentraleSupélec, France
Sabeur Aridhi LORIA - Université de Lorraine, France
Kamel Barkaoui Cnam, France
Ladjel Bellatreche LIAS/ENSMA, France
Orlando Belo University of Minho, Portugal
Sidi Mohamed Benslimane University of Sidi Bel Abbes, Algeria
Jorge Bernardino ISEC - Polytechnic Institute of Coimbra, Portugal
Alexander Borusan TU Berlin/Fraunhofer FOKUS, Germany
Drazen Brdjanin University of Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Francesco Buccafurri UNIRC, Italy
Wellington Cabrera University of Houston, USA
Antonio Corral University of Almeria, Spain
Alain Crolotte Teradata Corporation, USA
Florian Daniel Politecnico di Milano, Italy
VIII Organization

Alex Delis University of Athens, Greece

Georgios Evangelidis University of Macedonia, Greece
Ylies Falcone Université Grenoble Alpes, Inria, Laboratoire
d’Informatique de Grenoble, France
Alfio Ferrara University of Milan, Italy
Enrico Gallinucci University of Bologna, Italy
Javier García-García IPN/UNAM, Mexico
Matteo Golfarelli University of Bologna, Italy
Anastasios Gounaris Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Emmanuel Grolleau LIAS, ISAE-ENSMA, France
Brahim Hamid IRIT - University of Toulouse, France
Slimane Hammoudi ESEO, France
Luis Iribarne University of Almería, Spain
Mirjana Ivanovic University of Novi Sad, Serbia
Petar Jovanovic Universitat Politècnica De Catalunya - Barcelona Tech,
Spain
Nadjet Kamel University of Science and Technology Houari
Boumedien, Algeria
Selma Khouri Ecole nationale Supérieure d’Informatique (ESI),
Algeria
Adamantios Koumpis University of Passau, Germany
Regine Laleau LACL - Paris Est Creteil University, France
Yves Ledru Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble - Université
Grenoble Alpes, France
Carson Leung University of Manitoba, Canada
Zhiming Liu Southwest University, China
Ivan Luković University of Novi Sad, Serbia
Sofian Maabout LaBRI - University of Bordeaux, France
Yannis Manolopoulos Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Patrick Marcel Université François Rabelais Tours, France
Dominique Méry LORIA - Université de Lorraine, France
Mohamed Mosbah LaBRI - University of Bordeaux, France
Chokri Mraidha CEA LIST, France
Vo Ngoc Phu Duy Tan University, Vietnam
Carlos Ordonez University of Houston, USA
Yassine Ouhammou LIAS/ENSMA, France
Jose Ignacio Panach University of Valencia, Spain
Navarrete
Oscar Pastor Lopez Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain
Jaroslav Pokorný Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic
Giuseppe Polese University of Salerno, Italy
Elvinia Riccobene University of Milan, Italy
Oscar Romero Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain
Dimitris Sacharidis Vienna University of Technology, Austria
Milos Savic University of Novi Sad, Serbia
Klaus-Dieter Schewe Software Competence Center Hagenberg, Austria
 Organization IX

Timos Sellis Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

Giovanni Simonini Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy
Neeraj Singh INPT-ENSEEIHT/IRIT, University of Toulouse,
France
Riccardo Torlone Roma Tre University, Italy
Ismail Toroslu Middle East Technical University, Turkey
Predrag Tosic University of Idaho, USA
Goce Trajcevski Northwestern University, USA
Javier Tuya University of Oviedo, Spain
Theodoros Tzouramanis University of the Aegean, Greece
Michael Vassilakopoulos University of Thessaly, Greece
Panos Vassiliadis University of Ioannina, Greece
Robert Wrembel Poznan University of Technology, Poland
Yiqun Zhang University of Houston, USA

Additional Reviewers

Berkani, Nabila Hewasinghage, Moditha Morshed, Ahsan

Boden, Christoph Ivančević, Vladimir Pekergin, Nihal
Bonfanti, Silvia Jaber, Mohamad Rafailidis, Dimitrios
Bouchez-Tichadou, Jovanovic, Petar Ristic, Sonja
Florent Kiefer, Martin Sarker, Bishnu
El-Hokayem, Antoine Kunft, Andreas Sellami, Akrem
Galicia Auyon, Jorge Liao, Kewen Varga, Jovan
Gounaris, Anastasios Mammar, Amel Velentzas, Chronis
Haq, Anam Meiners, Jens Yavari, Ali
Invited Papers
Data Science with Vadalog: Bridging Machine
Learning and Reasoning

Luigi Bellomarini1,2, Ruslan R. Fayzrakhmanov1, Georg Gottlob1,3,

Andrey Kravchenko1, Eleonora Laurenza2, Yavor Nenov1,
Stéphane Reissfelder1, Emanuel Sallinger1, Evgeny Sherkhonov1,
and Lianlong Wu1
1
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
ggottlob@gmail.com
2
Banca d’Italia, Rome, Italy
3
TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

Abstract. Following the recent successful examples of large technology com-

panies, many modern enterprises seek to build knowledge graphs to provide a
unified view of corporate knowledge and to draw deep insights using machine
learning and logical reasoning. There is currently a perceived disconnect
between the traditional approaches for data science, typically based on machine
learning and statistical modelling, and systems for reasoning with domain
knowledge. In this paper we present a state-of-the-art Knowledge Graph Man-
agement System, Vadalog, which delivers highly expressive and efficient logical
reasoning and provides seamless integration with modern data science toolkits,
such as the Jupyter platform. We demonstrate how to use Vadalog to perform
traditional data wrangling tasks, as well as complex logical and probabilistic
reasoning. We argue that this is a significant step forward towards combining
machine learning and reasoning in data science.
 Modeling Distributed Algorithms by Local
Computations with Applications

Mohamed Mosbah

LaBRI, Bordeaux INP, Univ. Bordeaux,

CNRS, F33405 Talence, France
mosbah@u-bordeaux.fr

Abstract. We present a model based on local interactions for modeling, proving

and implementing distributed algorithms. Many examples of distributed algo-
rithms illustrate this approach, together with an integrated software environment.

Keywords: Local computations
Distributed algorithms
Formal proofs

Problems related to distributed systems are a major concern of research in computer

science. We can particularly mention the design and the development of distributed
architectures or distributed programming environments, the specification and the ver-
ification of distributed algorithms, as well as the study of (wired or wireless) com-
munication networks. All these paradigms are essential for the safety and the security
of distributed systems. However, the development of distributed systems is yet not well
understood. In particular, distributed algorithms are difficult to design and to study, and
even to represent, mainly when nodes communicating only with their neighbours must
participate to achieve a global goal.
The design, validation, verification and debugging remain a hard task for most
programmers and computer scientists. This is due to the intrinsic complexity of dis-
tributed algorithms and programs compared to serial ones. Programmers must coor-
dinate and synchronize communication between processes. This problem becomes
crucial for critical environments for which safety and security must be guaranteed. For
the success of all those undertakings it is crucial to master the mechanisms and local
phenomena at the foundations of such systems. This requires the investigation into
different models of distributed computation, the fundamental understanding of local
interactions and the ability to solve global problems only by local actions. This talk will
focus on different models that are used to represent these systems.
We detail local computations model that allows a high level encoding of distributed
algorithms by graph relabeling systems making it easy the integration of mathematical
proofs into distributed computations. In this formalism, a distributed system is repre-
sented by a labeled graph; the nodes represent the processors and the edges represent
the links between them. The labels are used to encode the internal states of processors
and/or channels. A rule in such a calculus is defined by a small context graph (used as
an ‘anchor’ for application in the host graph) together with two labeling configurations
to this context, one to describe the local state before rule application, and the other to
 Modeling Distributed Algorithms by Local Computations with Applications XV

specify the local state after rule application. The transformation is strictly local; there
are no long-distance side-effects.
A general proof schema for proving distributed computation, together with a uni-
fied framework ranging from the early design until the implementation, will be pre-
sented. In fact, he high level encoding of distributed algorithms by graph relabeling
systems makes it easy the integration of mathematical proofs into distributed algo-
rithms. On the other hand, it is possible to formalize the semantics of local compu-
tations with proof assistants, such as Event-B or Coq. Many examples will be
discussed, such as leader election, spanning tree computation, coloring. An integrated
software environment, including the design, the proof and the visualization of dis-
tributed algorithms will be presented.

References
1. Abdou, W., Abdallah, N., Mosbah, M.: Visidia: a java framework for designing, simulating,
and visualizing distributed algorithms. In: Proceedings - IEEE International Symposium on
Distributed Simulation and Real-Time Applications, DS-RT, pp. 43–46 (2014)
2. Boussabbeh, M., Tounsi, M., Kacem, A.H., Mosbah, M.: Towards a general framework for
ensuring and reusing proofs of termination detection in distributed computing. In: Proceedings
- 24th Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed, and Network-Based
Processing, PDP 2016, pp. 504–511 (2016)
3. Boussabbeh, M., Tounsi, M., Mosbah, M., Kacem, A.H.: Formal proofs of termination
detection for local computations by refinement-based compositions. In: Butler, M., Schewe,
K.D., Mashkoor, A., Biro, M. (eds.) ABZ 2016, vol. 9675, pp. 198–212. Springer, Cham
(2016)
4. DAMPAS Homepage. http://visidia.labri.fr/
5. Ktari, M., Haddar, M., Mosbah, M., Kacem, A.H.: Maintenance of a spanning tree for
dynamic graphs by mobile agents and local computations. RAIRO Theor. Inf. Appl. 51(2),
51–70 (2017)
6. Méry, D., Mosbah, M., Tounsi, M.: Refinement-based verification of local synchronization
algorithms. In: Butler, M., Schulte, W. (eds.) FM 2011. LNCS, vol. 6664, pp. 338–352.
Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
 Contents

Invited Paper

Data Science with Vadalog: Bridging Machine Learning and Reasoning . . . . 3

Luigi Bellomarini, Ruslan R. Fayzrakhmanov, Georg Gottlob,
Andrey Kravchenko, Eleonora Laurenza, Yavor Nenov,
Stéphane Reissfelder, Emanuel Sallinger, Evgeny Sherkhonov,
and Lianlong Wu

Databases

NoSQL Databases – Seek for a Design Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

Chaimae Asaad and Karim Baïna

Mortadelo: A Model-Driven Framework for NoSQL Database Design . . . . . . 41

Alfonso de la Vega, Diego García-Saiz, Carlos Blanco,
Marta Zorrilla, and Pablo Sánchez

Towards OntoUML for Software Engineering: Experimental Evaluation

of Exclusivity Constraints in Relational Databases. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
Zdeněk Rybola and Michal Valenta

Ontology and Model Driven Engineering

Scrum and V Lifecycle Combined with Model-Based Testing and Model

Driven Architecture to Deal with Evolutionary System Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Imane Essebaa and Salima Chantit

Adaptive Algorithms for Computing Ontologies Metrics Through

Processing of RDF Graphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
Jean Vincent Fonou-Dombeu and Yannick Kazela Kazadi

CRank: A Novel Framework for Ranking Semantic Web Ontologies . . . . . . . 107

Jean Vincent Fonou-Dombeu and Serestina Viriri

Data Fusion, Classification and Learning

A New Way of Handling Missing Data in Multi-source Classification

Based on Adaptive Imputation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
Ikram Abdelkhalek, Afef Ben Brahim, and Nadia Essousi
XVIII Contents

Feedback-Oriented Assessor Model: Application: Allocation

of Submissions in Online Peer Assessment. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
Mohamed-Amine Abrache, Khalid Megder, and Chihab Cherkaoui

Communication and Information Technologies

A Gamification and Objectivity Based Approach to Improve

Users Motivation in Mobile Crowd Sensing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
Hasna El Alaoui El Abdallaoui, Abdelaziz El Fazziki,
Fatima Zohra Ennaji, and Mohamed Sadgal

Modeling and Evaluating Cross-layer Elasticity Strategies

in Cloud Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
Khaled Khebbeb, Nabil Hameurlain, and Faiza Belala

Thing Federation as a Service: Foundations and Demonstration . . . . . . . . . . 184

Zakaria Maamar, Khouloud Boukadi, Emir Ugljanin, Thar Baker,
Muhammad Asim, Mohammed Al-Khafajiy, Djamal Benslimane,
and Hasna El Alaoui El Abdallaoui

Formalizing Reusable Communication Models for Distributed

Systems Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
Quentin Rouland, Brahim Hamid, and Jason Jaskolka

Safety and Security

A Valid BPMN Extension for Supporting Security Requirements Based

on Cyber Security Ontology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
Mohamed El Amine Chergui and Sidi Mohamed Benslimane

A Correct-by-Construction Model for Attribute-Based Access Control . . . . . . 233

Hania Gadouche, Zoubeyr Farah, and Abdelkamel Tari

Algorithmics and Text Processing

Voronoi-Diagram Based Partitioning for Distance Join Query Processing

in SpatialHadoop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251
Francisco García-García, Antonio Corral, Luis Iribarne,
and Michael Vassilakopoulos

Graph Pattern Matching Preserving Label-Repetition Constraints. . . . . . . . . . 268

Houari Mahfoud

Standard and Dialectal Arabic Text Classification for Sentiment Analysis . . . 282
Mohcine Maghfour and Abdeljalil Elouardighi
 Contents XIX

A Graph-Based Model for Tag Recommendations in Clinical

Decision Support System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292
Sara Qassimi, El Hassan Abdelwahed, Meriem Hafidi,
and Rachid Lamrani

Spatial Batch-Queries Processing Using xBR þ -trees in Solid-State Drives . . . 301

George Roumelis, Michael Vassilakopoulos, Antonio Corral,
Athanasios Fevgas, and Yannis Manolopoulos

Specification, Verification and Validation

Formalizing Railway Signaling System ERTMS/ETCS

Using UML/Event-B . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321
Abderrahim Ait Wakrime, Rahma Ben Ayed, Simon Collart-Dutilleul,
Yves Ledru, and Akram Idani

A Dynamic Analysis for Reverse Engineering of Sequence Diagram

Using CPN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331
Chafik Baidada, El Mahi Bouziane, and Abdeslam Jakimi

A Formalized Procedure for Database Horizontal Fragmentation

in Isabelle/HOL Proof Assistant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 346
Cheikh Salmi, Mohamed Chaabani, and Mohamed Mezghiche

Domain-Oriented Verification Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 354

Vincent Leildé, Vincent Ribaud, Ciprian Teodorov,
and Philippe Dhaussy

A Formal Model for Interaction Specification and Analysis

in IoT Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371
Souad Marir, Faiza Belala, and Nabil Hameurlain

Mechanizing the Denotational Semantics of the Clock Constraint

Specification Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385
Mathieu Montin and Marc Pantel

Ensuring the Functional Correctness of IoT through Formal Modeling

and Verification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 401
Samir Ouchani

Extensions to Hybrid Event-B to Support Concurrency

in Cyber-Physical Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 418
Klaus-Dieter Schewe

Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 435

Invited Paper
 Data Science with Vadalog: Bridging
Machine Learning and Reasoning

Luigi Bellomarini1,2 , Ruslan R. Fayzrakhmanov1 , Georg Gottlob1,3(B) ,

Andrey Kravchenko1 , Eleonora Laurenza2 , Yavor Nenov1 ,
Stéphane Reissfelder1 , Emanuel Sallinger1 , Evgeny Sherkhonov1 ,
and Lianlong Wu1
1
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
ggottlob@gmail.com
2
Banca d’Italia, Rome, Italy
3
TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

Abstract. Following the recent successful examples of large technology

companies, many modern enterprises seek to build knowledge graphs to
provide a unified view of corporate knowledge and to draw deep insights
using machine learning and logical reasoning. There is currently a per-
ceived disconnect between the traditional approaches for data science,
typically based on machine learning and statistical modelling, and sys-
tems for reasoning with domain knowledge. In this paper we present a
state-of-the-art Knowledge Graph Management System, Vadalog, which
delivers highly expressive and efficient logical reasoning and provides
seamless integration with modern data science toolkits, such as the
Jupyter platform. We demonstrate how to use Vadalog to perform tradi-
tional data wrangling tasks, as well as complex logical and probabilistic
reasoning. We argue that this is a significant step forward towards com-
bining machine learning and reasoning in data science.

Keywords: Knowledge graphs · Data science · Machine learning

Reasoning · Probabilistic reasoning

1 Introduction
Enterprises increasingly depend on intelligent information systems that oper-
ationalise corporate knowledge as a unified source across system boundaries.
Such systems crucially rely on insights produced by data scientists, who use
advanced data and graph analytics together with machine learning and statisti-
cal models to create predictive actionable knowledge from suitably preprocessed
corporate data by means of data wrangling. To maintain their competitive edge,
companies need to incorporate multiple heterogeneous sources of information,
including streams of structured or unstructured data from internal systems (e.g.,
Enterprise Resource Planning, Workflow Management, and Supply Chain Man-
agement), external streams of unstructured data (e.g., news and social media
c Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
E. H. Abdelwahed et al. (Eds.): MEDI 2018, LNCS 11163, pp. 3–21, 2018.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00856-7_1
4 L. Bellomarini et al.

feeds, and Common Crawl1 ), publicly available and proprietary sources of semi-
structured data (e.g., DBpedia [11], Wikidata [46], UniProt [19], data.gov.uk),
structured data extracted from web pages using web data extraction techniques
[24], as well as internal and external knowledge bases/ontologies (e.g., Research-
Cyc2 , DBpedia [11], Wikidata [46], FIBO3 ). The integration of such diverse
information is a non-trivial task that presents data scientists with a number of
challenges including: the extraction and handling of big data with frequently
changing content and structure; dealing with uncertainty of the extracted data;
and finding ways of unifying the information from different sources.
Following the trend of large technological companies such as Google, Ama-
zon, Facebook, and, LinkedIn, it is becoming common for enterprises to inte-
grate their internal and external sources of information into a unified knowledge
graph. A knowledge graph typically consists of graph-structured data to allow
for smooth accommodation of changes in the structure of the data, and knowl-
edge layers, which encode business logic used for the validation and enrichment
of data and the uncovering of critical insights from it. Graph-structured data
may stem from data directly exposed as graphs (e.g., RDF4 used by triple stores
such as GraphDB5 , Property Graphs used by graph databases like neo4j6 , and
JanusGraph7 ) or relational or semi-structured data that exhibits graph struc-
ture. The consolidated and enriched knowledge graph is then processed using the
standard data science toolkit for graph analytics (including languages such as
Cypher8 , SPARQL9 , and Gremlin10 ), statistical analysis (using the R statistical
framework), and machine learning (using toolkits such as Weka11 , scikit-learn12 ,
and TensorFlow13 ).
The creation of a coherent knowledge graph from multiple sources of unstruc-
tured, semi-structured, and structured data is a challenging task that requires
techniques from multiple disciplines. Entity resolution [18] is used to combine
multiple sources of (semi-)structured data that do not share common identifiers.
The goal is to identify pairs of entities that refer to the same real-world object
and merge them into a single entity. The matching is performed using noisy, semi-
identifying information (e.g., names, addresses) and relationships, and employs
specialised similarity functions for strings, numbers, and dates, to determine the

1
http://commoncrawl.org/.
2
http://www.cyc.com/researchcyc/.
3
https://spec.edmcouncil.org/static/ontology/.
4
https://www.w3.org/RDF/.
5
http://graphdb.ontotext.com/.
6
https://neo4j.com/.
7
http://janusgraph.org/.
8
https://neo4j.com/developer/cypher-query-language/.
9
https://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/.
10
https://tinkerpop.apache.org/gremlin.html.
11
https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/.
12
http://scikit-learn.org/.
13
https://www.tensorflow.org/.
 Data Science with Vadalog 5

overall similarity of two entities. Information extraction [43] is used for auto-
matically extracting structured data from unstructured sources (i.e., news and
social media feeds). Thus, for example, the news feed “PayPal buys Hyperwallet
for $400M” could result into the structured statement “acquire(PayPal, Hyper-
wallet)”. Information extraction is typically combined with entity resolution to
correctly incorporate the extracted information within an existing knowledge
graph.
Publicly available datasets are often equipped with ontologies which describe
relationships between entities. In such cases ontological reasoning needs to be
applied to validate whether the results of entity resolution and information
extraction violate any of the constraints imposed by the ontology as well as
to enrich the data with new information stemming from the newly produced
facts. Further note that, unsurprisingly, the use of machine learning is pervasive
throughout the stages of the data scientist’s workflow: from semantically anno-
tating web page elements during web data extraction, through deciding whether
entities should be matched during entity resolution, to predicting numerical
trends during data analytics over the knowledge graph. Finally, observe that
although uncertainty is intrinsic to many of the tasks in the data scientist’s
workflow, it is typically resolved by the means of a threshold. For example, dur-
ing entity resolution, the similarity of the attributes of two entities is typically
converted to a probability for the two entities to be the same, and they are
matched if the probability exceeds a certain threshold. Similarly, the informa-
tion extraction stage typically associates output facts with level of uncertainty
stemming from the extraction process, but likewise to the case of entity reso-
lution, the uncertainty is converted into a probability for a fact to hold, and a
hard decision is made on whether it should be included or not. Interestingly, one
can do better than that. One may want to impose levels of uncertainty using
business rules to better inform the decision of whether and how the knowledge
graph should be updated. One such rule, for example, could be that public com-
panies are much more likely to acquire private companies than vice-versa (the
so called reverse takeover ). Such rules can be produced by a domain expert or
learned from the data using rule learning [7]. Furthermore, instead of ignoring
the uncertainty, after it is being used to determine whether to accept a fact or a
match, for example, one could alternatively incorporate this uncertainty into the
knowledge graph and propagate them into the further stages of data wrangling
and data analytics workflow.
To carry out the different stages of the described workflow data scientists need
to use and coordinate a number of tools, languages, and technologies: for data
access they require tools for web data extraction, various data-base management
systems, triple stores and graph databases; during knowledge graph construction
they require tools for entity resolution, information extraction, ontological rea-
soning, and uncertainty management; and during the analysis stage they require
tools for graph analytic, machine learning and statistical modelling. The coor-
dination of all these tools can be very challenging.
6 L. Bellomarini et al.

In this paper we present the Vadalog engine: a state-of-the-art Knowledge

Graph Management System (KGMS) that provides a unified framework for inte-
grating the various tools and technologies used by data scientists. Its language
Vadalog is an extension of the rule-based language Datalog [1], and can naturally
capture SQL (through support for the SQL operators), ontological reasoning
in OWL 2 QL14 and SPARQL (through the use of existential quantifiers), and
graph analytics (through non-trivial support for recursion and aggregation). The
declarative nature of the language makes the code concise, manageable, and self-
explanatory. The engine is fully extensible through its bindings to different data
sources and libraries. Data extensions provide access to relational data stored
in Postgres or MySQL, for example, or to graph data stored in neo4j or Janus,
or to web data using OXPath [24]. Library extensions allow the integration of
state-of-the-art machine learning tools such as Weka, scikit-learn, or Tensor-
Flow. Additional integration with libraries for string similarities and regular
expressions allows for defining complex entity resolution workflows. The engine
also supports reasoning with probabilistic data and probabilistic rules, which
makes it ideal for handling uncertainty stemming from the different stages of
the data scientist’s workflow. Finally, the Vadalog engine seamlessly integrates
with Jupyter: a well-known platform for data analysts and scientists with a con-
venient interface for data processing and visualisation.
The paper is organised as follows. Section 2 provides an overview of the core
language. Section 3 provides a system overview of the Vadalog engine. Section 4
describes the various features of the system within a typical data scientist’s work-
flow in Jupyter. Section 5 demonstrates the engine’s integration with machine
learning on typical use cases. Finally, Sect. 6 describes in more detail the sup-
port of the system for probabilistic reasoning.
This paper includes, in abbreviated form, material from a number of pre-
vious papers on the topic [7–10]. The Vadalog system is Oxford’s contribution
to VADA [34], a joint project of the universities of Edinburgh, Manchester, and
Oxford. We reported first work on the overall VADA approach to data wrangling
in [25]. In this paper, we focus on the Vadalog system at its core. Currently, our
system fully implements the core language and is already in use for a number of
industrial applications.

2 Core Language
Vadalog is a Datalog-based language. It belongs to the Datalog± family of lan-
guages that extends Datalog by existential quantifiers in rule heads, as well as by
other features, and at the same time restricts its syntax in order to achieve decid-
ability and data tractability; see, e.g., [14–17]. The logical core of the Vadalog
language corresponds to Warded Datalog± [4,29], which captures plain Datalog
as well as SPARQL queries under the entailment regime for OWL 2 QL [28]
and is able to perform ontological reasoning tasks. Reasoning with the logical
core of Vadalog is computationally efficient. Vadalog is obtained by extending
14
https://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-profiles/.
 Data Science with Vadalog 7

Warded Datalog± with additional features of practical utility. We now illustrate

the logical core of Vadalog, more details about extensions can be found in [7].
The logical core of Vadalog relies on the notion of wardedness, which applies
a restriction on how the “dangerous” variables of a set of existential rules are
used. Note that existential rules are also known as tuple-generating dependencies
(tgds), i.e., Datalog rules where existential quantification is allowed in the head.
Intuitively, a “dangerous” variable is a body-variable that can be unified with a
labelled null value when the chase algorithm is applied, and it is also propagated
to the head of the rule. For example, given the set Σ consisting of the rules

P (x) → ∃z R(x, z) and R(x, y) → P (y),

the variable y in the body of the second rule is “dangerous” (w.r.t. Σ) since
starting, e.g., from the database D = {P (a)}, the chase will apply the first rule
and generate R(a, ν), where ν is a null that acts as a witness for the existentially
quantified variable z, and then the second rule will be applied with the variable
y being unified with ν that is propagated to the obtained atom P (ν).
Note that, throughout this paper, we will mix the “logical” notation shown
above that is often used in papers, and the “code”-like notation that is used
in systems, such as the Vadalog system. The above example would be given as
follows in Vadalog notation:

r(X,Z) :- p(X).
p(Y) :- r(X,Y).

The goal of wardedness is to tame the way null values are propagated during the
construction of the chase instance by posing the following conditions: (i) all the
“dangerous” variables should coexist in a single body-atom α, called the ward ;
(ii) the ward can share only “harmless” variables with the rest of the body, i.e.,
variables that are unified only with database constants during the construction
of the chase.
Warded Datalog± consists of all the (finite) sets of warded existential rules.
As an example of a warded set of rules, the following rules encode part of the
OWL 2 direct semantics entailment regime for OWL 2 QL (see [4,29]):

Type(x, y), Restriction(y, z) → ∃w Triple(x, z, w)

Type(x, y), SubClass(y, z) → Type(x, z)
Triple(x, y, z), Inverse(y, w) → Triple(z, w, x)
Triple(x, y, z), Restriction(w, y) → Type(x, w).

It is easy to verify that the above set is warded, where the underlined atoms are
the wards. Indeed, a variable that occurs in an atom of the form Restriction(·, ·),
or SubClass(·, ·), or Inverse(·, ·), is trivially harmless. However, variables that
appear in the first position of Type, or in the first/third position of Triple can
be dangerous. Thus, the underlined atoms are indeed acting as the wards.
8 L. Bellomarini et al.

Reasoning in Warded Datalog± is PTIME-complete in data complexity [4,

29]. Although polynomial time data complexity is desirable for conventional
applications, PTIME-hardness can be prohibitive for “Big Data” applications.
One such example is towards building knowledge graphs that consider huge
elections in the area of computational social choice [20]. Yet, in fact, this is true
even for linear time data complexity. This is discussed in more detail in [7].
This core language has a number of extensions to make it practical, among
them data types, arithmetic, (monotonic) aggregation, bindings of predicates to
external data sources, binding function symbols to external functions, and more.
We will discuss monotonic aggregation here. Vadalog supports aggregation
(min, max, sum, prod, count), by means of an extension to the notion of mono-
tonic aggregations [44], which allows adopting aggregation even in the presence
of recursion while preserving monotonicity w.r.t. set containment. Such func-
tionality is crucial for performing graph analytics, an example of which is shown
in Sect. 4.
We will discuss some of these extensions throughout this paper. One of the
extensions that are planned is more support consistency, in particular consistent
query answering [3,5] as well as view updates [13,31].

3 Core System
The functional architecture of the
Vadalog system, our KGMS, is
depicted in Fig. 1. The knowledge
graph is organised as a repository, a
collection of Vadalog rules. The exter-
nal sources are supported by means of
transducers, intelligent adapters that
integrate the sources into the reason-
ing process.
The Big Data characteristics of
the sources and the complex func-
tional requirements of reasoning are
tackled by leveraging the underpin-
nings of the core language, which are
turned into practical execution strate- Fig. 1. KGMS reference architecture [7]
gies. In particular, in the reasoning
algorithms devised for Warded Datalog± , after a certain number of chase steps
(which, in general, depends on the input database), the chase graph [15] (a
directed acyclic graph where facts are represented as nodes and the applied rules
as edges) exhibits specific periodicities and no new information, relevant to query
answering, is generated. The Vadalog system adopts an aggressive recursion and
termination control strategy, which detects such redundancy as early as possi-
ble by combining compile-time and runtime techniques. In combination with a
highly engineered architecture, the Vadalog system achieves high performance
and an efficient memory footprint.
 Data Science with Vadalog 9

At compile time, as wardedness limits the interaction between the labelled

nulls, the engine rewrites the program in such a way that joins on specific val-
ues of labelled nulls will never occur. This exploits work on schema mapping
composition and optimisation [32,33,38,42].
The Vadalog system uses a pull stream-based approach (or pipeline app-
roach), where the facts are actively requested from the output nodes to their
predecessors and so on down to the input nodes, which eventually fetch the facts
from the data sources. The stream approach is essential to limit the memory
consumption or at least make it predictable, so that the system is effective for
large volumes of data. Our setting is made more challenging by the presence of
multiple interacting rules in a single rule set and the wide presence of recur-
sion. We address this by means of a specialised buffer management technique.
We adopt pervasive local caches in the form of wrappers to the nodes of the
access plan, where the facts produced by each node are stored. The local caches
work particularly well in combination with the pull stream-based approach, since
facts requested by a node successor can be immediately reused by all the other
successors, without triggering further backward requests. Also, this combination
realises an extreme form of multi-query optimisation, where each rule exploits
the facts produced by the others, whenever applicable. To limit memory occu-
pation, the local caches are flushed with an eager eviction strategy that detects
when a fact has been consumed by all the possible requestors and thus drops it
from the memory. Cases of actual cache overflow are managed by resorting to
standard disk swap heuristics (e.g., LRU, LFU).
More details on the Vadalog system can be found in [10]. The system includes
many other features, such as data extraction with OXPath, which is in use with
our collaborators at dblp [36].

4 Supporting the Data Science Workflow

As the importance of data science constantly increases, the Vadalog system can
support the entire spectrum of data science tasks and processes to a certain
extent. It does not however replace tools specialists like to use, but rather conveys
a universal platform to integrate various approaches and tools into a unified
framework. All integrations are realised in terms of data binding primitives and
functions.
One such key example is the use of the UI/development platform, where
Jupyter was chosen as a platform that data scientists are familiar with. The
Vadalog system has seamless integration with JupyterLab with the use of a
Vadalog extension and kernel (see Fig. 2). JupyterLab is a well-known platform
for data analysts and scientists with a convenient interface for data processing
and visualisation. It has a multi-user support, in which dedicated resources and
the environment are associated with a concrete user. The Vadalog extension and
kernel for JupyterLab give data scientists the possibility to evaluate the correct-
ness of the program, run it, and analyse the derivation process of interesting
output facts. All output is rendered in JupyterLab’s output area.
10 L. Bellomarini et al.

Fig. 2. Example of the Vadalog program for inferring a company control indicator

Data Binding Primitives. Bindings give one a possibility to connect an auto-

matic reasoning workflow with external systems for data exchange. An external
system can represent a database, framework, library or information system. Cur-
rently Vadalog supports relational databases, such as Postgres and MySQL, and
graph databases, such as neo4j. It also has seamless integration with machine
learning tools, e.g., Weka and scikit-learn (see Sect. 5.1), and a web data extrac-
tion tool, OXPath [24] (see Fig. 3). Other integrations are included or can be
easily integrated. Data sources and targets can be declared by adopting @input
and @output annotations. Annotations are special facts augmenting sets of exis-
tential rules with specific behaviours. @input and @output define the direction of
facts into and from the Vadalog program, respectively. Additional @bind anno-
tation defines means for interacting with an external system. A query bind anno-
tation @qbind is a special modification of @bind. It supports binding predicates
to queries against inputs and outputs in the external language (e.g., SQL-queries
for a data source or target that supports SQL). The first parameter of @bind
and @qbind specifies a predicate the external resource is bound to; the second
parameter defines a type of the target (e.g., “postgres”). In case the schema
of an external resource cannot be derived automatically, or should be overrid-
den, additional @mapping annotation can be used to define mapping strategy for
tuples between Vadalog and an external system.
 Data Science with Vadalog 11

Fig. 3. Integration of OXPath, a web data extraction tool

In Fig. 2, we give a synthetic example of a Vadalog program to infer a com-

pany control indicator. It can be formulated as follows: A company A “controls”
company B if A owns directly or indirectly (i.e., via shares in other companies)
more than 50% of B’s shares (lines 18–25). As we can see, various strategies
for binding external resources can be used in the Vadalog program. For exam-
ple, data tuples ownsDirectly can be propagated into the program from the
parametric @qbind (lines 6–7 for Postgres via tuples ownsDirectlyDB) or @bind
(line 11 for CSV via tuples ownsDirectlyCSV). For @qbind SQL query is instan-
tiated with the parameter from the predicate relevant country (line 8). The
query instantiation is realised within the join, in which the parameter C from
the relevant country predicate is propagated into the fourth term of the pred-
icate ownsDirectlyDB. In contrast, in case of @bind, all data is streamed into
the Vadalog system and filtered on-the-fly by only selecting information regard-
ing the “relevant country” (line 16). ownsDirectly tuples can also be specified
within the program in terms of facts (line 3). During the evaluation of the pro-
gram, each derived tuple controls is streamed into a Postgres database as it is
specified in lines 26–27.
In Fig. 3, we illustrate an example of binding with OXPath. OXPath [24] is
a web data extraction language, an extension of XPath 1.0 for interacting with
web applications and extracting data from them. In this example, the OXPath
binding streams all articles of Georg Gottlob from dblp website into the Vadalog
program. Extracted articles can be represented as a relation article(authors,
title, publication, pages). Integration with machine learning tools is dis-
cussed in the next section.
Functions. Besides bindings, functions provide a data scientist with a rich set
of value transformations and operations for different data types supported in
Vadalog. A user can write expressions of different complexity with the use of
12 L. Bellomarini et al.

operators and functions to perform arithmetic, manipulate strings, dates, and

compare values. Examples of supported data types are string, integer, double,
date, boolean, set, and a special identifier for unknown values, marked null. A
data scientist can also extend the set of supported functions with those written
in Python, which is enabled in the Vadalog framework. Functions can be com-
bined into libraries. For example, @library("sim:", "simmetrics"). enables
the “simmetrics” library in the Vadalog program, where methods can be invoked
with the prefix sim:, as in sim:removeDiacritics(Text) to remove diacrit-
ics from Text. We also convey libraries for building regression or classification
models on-the-fly and applying those on the data derived during the automatic
reasoning (see Sect. 5.1).

Fig. 4. A screenshot depicting code analysis for an altered Vadalog program in the
company control example

Code Analysis. The correctness of the program is assessed with the use of
the code analysis functionality (see Fig. 4). It checks whether there are essential
or well-known error patterns in the program. For example, in Fig. 4, we altered
the original program illustrated in Fig. 2. The parameter Share of the condition
in the line 18 was replaced with Share2, lines 10–15 were commented, leaving
ownsDirectlyCSV without the binding, and the output controls was changed
to controls2.
Fact Derivation Analysis. The analysis of derivations can be performed with
the use of explanations (see Fig. 5). It gives an explanation of how a certain fact
has been derived within the program and which rules have been triggered.
Bindings and functions make data analytics both more effective and efficient.
Vadalog directly interacts with various data sources regardless of their nature,
be it a database or the Web. Furthermore, with rich reasoning capabilities it
can lift the analysis up from basic values, tuples or relations within databases
to semantically rich structures, e.g., from property graphs such as of neo4j to
concepts of a domain ontology. This makes the code more concise and self-
explanatory.
 Data Science with Vadalog 13

Fig. 5. A screenshot of the output depicting a “yes”-explanation for the fact

controls("A", "C") in the company control example

The Vadalog system is a universal tool which can reconcile two opposite
paradigms of data scientists and domain experts, so-called “inductive” (or
bottom-up) and “deductive” (or top-down) approaches. An inductive paradigm
goes along with a statement that “patterns emerge before reasons for them
become apparent” [21]. It certainly refers to data mining and machine learn-
ing approaches which are used for deriving new knowledge and relations from
data. As all data scientists face in practice, “all models are wrong and some are
useful” [12, p. 208], which explains problems of finding the best model given a
dataset. Furthermore, limitations related to labour intensive labelling for some
machine learning algorithms can also cause incorrect or incomplete results. Thus,
knowledge of a domain expert with a deductive approach is important to correct
potential errors propagated from generated models.

5 Integrating Machine Learning

In this section, we will discuss
how to integrate machine learning
directly. We will focus on one of
the approaches to machine learning
integration, schematically illustrated
in Fig. 6. In the first subsection, we
will concretely talk about Weka and
scikit-learn integration. The system’s
TensorFlow integration is similar in
style to the scikit-learn integration. Fig. 6. Schematic view of the interaction
This will be followed in Subsect. 5.2 between machine learning and reasoning
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Loaves and
fishes
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
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laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

Title: Loaves and fishes

Author: Bernard Capes

Release date: September 11, 2023 [eBook #71615]

Most recently updated: October 24, 2023

Language: English

Original publication: London: Methuen & Co, 1906

Credits: an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOAVES

AND FISHES ***
LOAVES AND FISHES
BY
BERNARD CAPES

METHUEN & CO.

36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
First Published in 1906
 CONTENTS
A GALLOWS-BIRD
THE RAVELLED SLEAVE
THE SOUL OF THE PROFESSOR
A GHOST-CHILD
HIS CLIENT’S CASE
AN ABSENT VICAR
THE BREECHES BISHOP
THE STRENGTH OF THE ROPE
ARCADES AMBO
OUR LADY OF REFUGE
THE GHOST-LEECH
POOR LUCY RIVERS
THE FAIR WITH GOLDEN HAIR
THE LOST NOTES
THE UNLUCKIEST MAN IN THE WORLD
JACK THE SKIPPER
A BUBBLE REPUTATION
A POINT OF LAW
THE FIVE INSIDES
THE JADE BUTTON
DOG TRUST
A MARTYR TO CONSCIENCE
 [NOTE]
Acknowledgments are made to the editors of “The Pall Mall
Magazine,” “The Illustrated London News,” “The World,” “Black and
White,” “The London Magazine,” “The English Illustrated Magazine,”
and “The Bystander,” to the hospitality of whose pages a number of
the stories here reprinted were first invited.
 LOAVES AND FISHES

A GALLOWS-BIRD
In February of the year 1809, when the French were sat down before
Saragossa—then enduring its second and more terrific siege within a
period of six months—it came to the knowledge of the Duc
d’Abrantes, at that time the General commanding, that his army,
though undoubtedly the salt of the earth, was yet so little sufficient to
itself in the matter of seasoning, that it was reduced to the necessity
of flavouring its soup with the saltpetre out of its own cartridges. In
this emergency, d’Abrantes sent for a certain Ducos, captain on the
staff of General Berthier, but at present attached to a siege train
before the doomed town, and asked him if he knew whence, if
anywhere in the vicinity, it might be possible to make good the
deficiency.
Now this Eugène Ducos was a very progressive evolution of the
times, hatched by the rising sun, emerged stinging and splendid from
the exotic quagmires of the past. A facile linguist, by temperament
and early training an artist, he had flown naturally to the field of battle
as to that field most fertile of daring new effects, whose surprises
called for record rather than analysis. It was for him to collect the
impressions which, later, duller wits should classify. And, in the
meantime, here he was at twenty a captain of renown, and always a
creature of the most unflagging resourcefulness.
“You were with Lefebvre-Desnouettes in Aragon last year?”
demanded Junot.
“I was, General; both before the siege and during it.”
“You heard mention of salt mines in this neighbourhood?”
 “There were rumours of them, sir—amongst the hills of Ulebo; but
it was never our need to verify the rumours.”
“Take a company, now, and run them to earth. I will give you a
week.”
“Pardon me, General; I need no company but my own, which is
ever the safest colleague.”
Junot glared demoniacally. He was already verging on the
madness which was presently to destroy him.
“The devil!” he shouted. “You shall answer for that assurance! Go
alone, sir, since you are so obliging, and find salt; and at your peril
be killed before reporting the result to me. Bones of God! is every
skipjack with a shoulder-knot to better my commands?”
Ducos saluted, and wheeled impassive. He knew that in a few
days Marshal Lannes was to supplant this maniac.
*****
Up and away amongst the intricate ridges of the mountains, where
the half-unravelled knots of the Pyrenees flow down in threads, or
clustered threads, which are combed by and by into the plains south
of Saragossa, a dusky young goatherd loitered among the chestnut
trees on a hot afternoon. This boy’s beauty was of a supernal order.
His elastic young cheeks glowed with colour; his eyebrows were
resolute bows; his lips, like a pretty phrase of love, were set between
dimples like inverted commas. And, as he stood, he coquetted like
Dinorah to his own shadow, chasséd to it, spoke to it, upbraiding or
caressing, as it answered to his movements on the ground before
him—
“Ah, pretty one! ah, shameless! Art thou the shadow of the girl that
Eugenio loved? Fie, fie! thou wouldst betray this poor Anita—mock
the round limbs and little feet that will not look their part. Yet, betray
her to her love returning, and Anita will fall and kiss thee on her
knees—kiss the very shadow of Eugenio’s love. Ah, little shadow!
take wings and fly to him, who promised quickly to return. Say I am
good but sad, awaiting him; say that Anita suffers, but is patient. He
will remember then, and come. No shadow of disguise shall blind
him to his love. Go, go, before I repent and hold thee, jealous that
mine own shadow should run before to find his lips.”
 She stooped, and, with a fantastic gesture, threw her soul upon
the winds; then rose, and leaned against a tree, and began to sing,
and sigh and murmur softly:

“ ‘At the gate of heaven are sold brogues

For the little bare-footed angel rogues’—

Ah, little dear mother! it is the seventh month, and the sign is still
delayed. No baby, no lover. Alack! why should he return to me, who
am a barren olive! The husbandman asks a guerdon for his care.
Give me my little doll, Santissima, or I will be naughty and drink holy-
water: give me the shrill wee voice, which pierces to the father’s
heart, when even passion loiters. Ah, come to me, Eugenio, my
Eugenio!”
She raised her head quickly on the word, and her heart leaped. It
was to hear the sound of a footstep, on the stones far below, coming
up the mountain side. She looked to her shirt and jacket. Ragged as
they were, undeveloped as was the figure within them, she had been
so jealous a housewife that there was not in all so much as an eyelet
hole to attract a peeping Tom. Now, leaving her goats amongst the
scattered boulders of the open, she backed into the groves,
precautionally, but a little reluctant, because in her heart she was
curious.
The footsteps came on toilfully, and presently the man who was
responsible for them hove into sight. He wore the dress of an English
officer, save for the shepherd’s felt hat on his head; but his scarlet
jacket was knotted loosely by the sleeves about his throat, in order to
the disposition of a sling which held his left arm crookt in a bloody
swathe. He levered himself up with a broken spear-shaft; but he was
otherwise weaponless. A pistol, in Ducos’s creed, was the argument
of a fool. He carried his ammunition in his brains.
Having reached a little plateau, irregular with rocks shed from the
cliffs above, he sat down within the shadow of a grove of chestnut
and carob trees, and sighed, and wiped his brow, and nodded to all
around and below him.
“Yes, and yes, and of a truth,” thought he: “here is the country of
my knowledge. And yonder, deep and far amongst its myrtles and
mulberries, crawls the Ebro; and to my right, a browner clod amongst
the furrows of the valleys, heaves up the ruined monastery of San
Ildefonso, which Daguenet sacked, the radical; whilst I occupied (ah,
the week of sweet malvoisie and sweeter passion!) the little inn at
the junction of the Pampeluna and Saragossa roads. And what has
become of Anita of the inn? Alack! if my little fille de joie were but
here to serve me now!”
The goatherd slipped round the shoulder of a rock and stood
before him, breathing hard. Her black curls were, for all the world,
bandaged, as it might be, with a yellow napkin (though they were
more in the way to give than take wounds), and crowned rakishly
with a dusky sombrero. She wore a kind of gaskins on her legs,
loose, so as to reveal the bare knees and a little over; and across
her shoulders was slung a sun-burnt shawl, which depended in a bib
against her chest.
Now the one stood looking down and the other up, their visions
magnetically meeting and blending, till the eyes of the goatherd were
delivered of very stars of rapture.
Was this a spirit, thought Ducos, summoned of his hot and
necessitous desire? But the other had no such misgiving. All in a
moment she had fallen on her brown knees before him, and was
pitifully kissing his bandaged arm, while she strove to moan and
murmur out the while her ecstasy of gratitude.
“Nariguita!” he murmured, rallying as if from a dream; “Nariguita!”
She laughed and sobbed.
“Ah, the dear little happy name from thy lips! A thousand times will
I repeat it to myself, but never as thou wouldst say it. And now! Yes,
Nariguita, Eugenio—thine own ‘little nose’—thy child, thy baby, who
never doubted that this day would come—O darling of my soul, that
it would come!”—(she clung to him, and hid her face)—“Eugenio!
though the blossom of our love delays its fruitage!”
He smiled, recovered from his first astonishment. Ministers of
coincidence! In all the fantastic convolutions of war, the merry, the
danse-macabre, should not love’s reunions have a place? It was
nothing out of that context that here was he chanced again, and
timely, upon that same sweet instrument which he had once played
on, and done with, and thrown aside, careless of its direction. Now
he had but to stoop and reclaim it, and the discarded strings, it
seemed, were ready as heretofore to answer to his touch with any
melody he listed.
He caressed her with real delight. She was something more than
lovable. He made himself a very Judas to her lips.
“Anita, my little Anita!” he began glowingly; but she took him up
with a fevered eagerness, answering the question of his eyes.
“So long ago, ah Dios! And thou wert gone; and the birds were
silent; and under the heavy sky my father called me to him. He held
a last letter of thine, which had missed my hands for his. Love, sick
at our parting, had betrayed us. O, the letter! how I swooned to be
denied it! He was for killing me, a traitor. Well, I could not help but
be. But Tia Joachina had pity on me, and dressed me as you see,
and smuggled me to the hills, that I might at least have a chance to
live without suffering wrong. And, behold! the heavens smiled upon
me, knowing my love; and Señor Cangrejo took me to herd his
goats. For seven months—for seven long, faithful months; until the
sweetest of my heart’s flock should return to pasture in my bosom.
And now he has come, my lamb, my prince, even as he promised.
He has come, drawing me to him over the hills, following the lark’s
song of his love as it dropped to earth far forward of his steps.
Eugenio! O, ecstasy! Thou hast dared this for my sake?”
“Child,” answered the admirable Ducos, “I should have dared only
in breaking my word. Un honnête homme n’a que sa parole. That is
the single motto for a poor captain, Nariguita. And who is this Señor
Cangrejo?”
Some terror, offspring of his question, set her clinging to him once
more.
“What dost thou here?” she cried, with immediate inconsistency
—“a lamb among the wolves! Eugenio!”
“Eh!”—he took her up, with an air of bewilderment. “I am Sir
Zhones, the English capitaine, though it loose me your favour,
mamsellee. Wat! Damn eet, I say!”
She fell away, staring at him; then in a moment gathered, and
leapt to him again between tears and laughter.
“But this?” she asked, her eyes glistening; and she touched the
bandage.
 “Ah! that,” he answered. “Why, I was wounded, and taken prisoner
by the French, you understand? Also, I escaped from my captors. It
comes, blood and splint and all, from the smashed arm of a sabreur,
who, indeed, had no longer need of it.”
“For the love of Christ!” she cried in a panic. “Come away into the
trees, where none will observe us!”
“Bah! I have no fear, I,” said Ducos. But he rose, nevertheless,
with a smile, and, catching up the goatherd, bore her into the
shadows. There, sitting by her side, he assured her, the rogue, of the
impatience with which he had anticipated, of the eagerness with
which he had run to realize this longed-for moment. The escapade
had only been rendered possible, he said truthfully, by the opportune
demand for salt. Doubtless she would help him, for love’s sake, to
justify the venture to his General?
But, at that, she stared at him, troubled, and her lip began to
quiver.
“Ah, God!” she cried; “then it was not I in the first place! Go thy
ways, love; but for pity’s heart-sake let me weep a little. Yes, yes,
there is salt in the mountains, that I know, and where the caves lie.
But there are also Cangrejo—whom you French ruined and made a
madman—and a hundred like him, wild-cats hidden amongst the
leaves. And there, too, are the homeless friars of St. Ildefonso; and,
dear body of Christ! the tribunal of terror, the junta of women, who
are the worst of all—lynx-eyed demons.”
He smiled indulgently. Her terror amused him.
“Well, well,” he said; “well, well. And what, then, is this junta?”
“It is a scourge,” she whispered, shivering, “for traitors and for
spies. It gathers nightly, at sunset, in the dip yonder, and there
waters with blood its cross of death. This very evening, Cangrejo
tells me——”
She broke off, cuddled closer to her companion, and clasping her
hands and shrugging up her shoulders to him, went on awfully—
“Eugenio, there was a wagon-load of piastres coming secretly for
Saragossa by the Tolosa road. It was badly convoyed. One of your
generals got scent of it. The guard had time to hide their treasure
and disperse, but him whom they thought had betrayed them the
tribunal of women claimed, and to-night——”
 “Well, he will receive his wages. And where is the treasure
concealed?”
“Ah! that I do not know.”
Ducos got to his feet, and stretched and yawned.
“I have a fancy to see this meeting-place of the tribunal. Wilt thou
lead me to it, Nariguita?”
“Mother of God, thou art mad!”
“Then I must go alone, like a madman.”
“Eugenio, it is cursing and accurst. None will so much as look into
it by day; and, at dusk, only when franked by the holy church.”
“So greatly the better. Adios, Nariguita!”
It took them half an hour, descending cautiously, and availing
themselves of every possible shelter of bush and rock, to reach a
strangely formed amphitheatre set stark and shallow amongst the
higher swales of the valley, but so overhung with scrub of myrtle and
wild pomegranate as to be only distinguishable, and that scarcely,
from above. A ragged track, mounting from the lower levels into this
hollow, tailed off, and was attenuated into a point where it took a
curve of the rocks at a distance below.
As Ducos, approaching the rim, pressed through the thicket, a toss
of black crows went up from the mouth ahead of him, like cinders of
paper spouted from a chimney. He looked over. The brushwood
ceased at the edge of a considerable pit, roughly circular in shape,
whose sides, of bare sloping sand, met and flattened at the bottom
into an extended platform. Thence arose a triangular gibbet, a very
rack in a devil’s larder, all about which a hoard of little pitchy bird
scullions were busy with the joints. Holy mother, how they
squabbled, and flapped at one another with their sleeves, it seemed!
The two carcasses which hung there appeared, for all their heavy
pendulosity, to reel and rock with laughter, nudging one another in
eyeless merriment.
Ducos mentally calculated the distance to the gallows below from
any available coign of concealment.
“One could not hide close enough to hear anything,” he murmured,
shaking his head in aggravation; “and this junta of ladies—it will
probably talk. What if it were to discuss that very question of the
piastres? Nariguita, will you go and be my little reporter at the
ceremony?”
Anita, crouching in the brush behind him, whispered terrified: “It is
impossible. They admit none but priests and women.”
“And are not you a woman, most beautiful?”
“God forbid!” she said. “I am the little goatherd Ambrosio.”
He stood some moments, frowning. A scheme, daring and
characteristic, was beginning to take shape in his brain.
“What is that clump of rags by the gallows?” he asked, without
looking round.
“It is not rags; it is rope, Eugenio.”
He thought again.
“And when do they come to hang this rascal?” he said.
“It is always at dusk. O, dear mother!” she whimpered, for the
young man had suddenly slipped between the branches, and was
going swiftly and softly down the pit-side.
Already the basin of sand was filled with the shadows from the
hills. Ducos approached the gibbet. The last of the birds remaining
arose and dispersed, quarrelling with nothing so much as the
sunlight which they encountered above.
“It is an abominable task,” said the aide-de-camp, looking up at the
dangling bodies; “but—for the Emperor—always for the Emperor!
That fellow, now, in the domino—it would make us appear of one
build. And as for complexion, why, he at least would have no eyes
for the travesty. Mon Dieu! I believe it is a Providence.”
There was a ladder leaned against the third and empty beam. He
put it into position for the cloaked figure, and ran up it. The rope was
hitched to a hook in the cross-piece. He must clasp and lever up his
burden by main strength before he could slacken and detach the
cord. Then, with an exclamation of relief, he let the body drop upon
the sand beneath. He descended the ladder in excitement.
“Anita!” he called.
She had followed, and was at hand. She trembled, and was as
pale as death.
“Help me,” he panted—“with this—into the bush.”
He had lifted his end by the shoulders.
“What devil possesses you? I cannot,” she sobbed; “I shall die.”
 “Ah, Nariguita! for my sake! There is no danger if thou art brave
and expeditious.”
Between them they tugged and trailed their load into the dense
undergrowth skirting the open track, and there let it plunge and sink.
Ducos removed the domino from the body, rolling and hauling at that
irreverently. Then he saw how the wretch had been pinioned, wrists
and ankles, beneath.
Carrying the cloak, he hastened back to the gallows. There he
cautiously selected from the surplus stock of cord a length of some
twelve feet, at either end of which he formed a loop. So, mounting
the ladder, over the hook he hitched this cord by one end, and then,
swinging himself clear, slid down the rope until he could pass both
his feet into the lower hank.
“Voilà!” said he. “Come up and tie me to the other with some little
pieces round the waist and knees and neck.”
She obeyed, weeping. Her love and her duty were to this wonder
of manhood, however dreadful his counsel. Presently, trussed to his
liking, he bade her fetch the brigand’s cloak and button it over all.
“Now,” said he, “one last sacramental kiss; and, so descending
and placing the ladder and all as before, thou shalt take standing-
room in the pit for this veritable dance of death.”
A moment—and he was hanging there, to all appearance a
corpse. The short rope at his neck had been so disposed and
knotted—the collar of the domino serving—as to make him look,
indeed, as if he strained at the tether’s end. He had dragged his long
hair over his eyes; his head lolled to one side; his tongue protruded.
For the rest, the cloak hid all, even to his feet.
The goatherd snivelled.
“Ah, holy saints, he is dead!”
The head came erect, grinning.
“Eugenio!” she cried; “O, my God! Thou wilt be discovered—thou
wilt slip and strangle! Ah, the crows—body of my body, the crows!”
“Imbecile! have I not my hands? See, I kiss one to thee. Now the
sun sinks, and my ghostly vigil will be short. Pray heaven only they
alight not on that in the bush. Nariguita, little heroine, this is my last
word. Go hide thyself in the bushes above, and watch what a
Frenchman, the most sensitive of mortals, will suffer to serve his
Emperor.”
It was an era, indeed, of sublime lusts and barbaric virtues, when
men must mount upon stepping-stones, not of their dead selves, but
of their slaughtered enemies, to higher things. Anita, like Ducos, was
a child of her generation. To her mind the heroic purpose of this deed
overpowered its pungency. She kissed her lover’s feet; secured the
safe disposition of the cloak about them; then turned and fled into
hiding.
*****
At dusk, with the sound of footsteps coming up the pass, the
crows dispersed. Eugène, for all his self-sufficiency, had sweated
over their persistence. A single more gluttonous swoop might at any
moment, in blinding him, have laid him open to a general attack
before help could reach him from the eyrie whence unwearying love
watched his every movement. Now, common instance of the
providence which waits on daring, the sudden lift and scatter of the
swarm left his hearing sensible to the tinkling of a bridle, which came
rhythmical from the track below. Immediately he fell, with all his soul,
into the pose of death.
The cadence of the steely warning so little altered, the footsteps
stole in so muffled and so deadly, that, peering presently through slit
eyelids for the advent of the troop, it twitched his strung nerves to
see a sinister congress already drawn soundless about the gibbet on
which he hung. Perhaps for the first time in this stagnant atmosphere
he realized the peril he had invited. But still the gambler’s providence
befriended him.
They were all women but two—the victim, a sullen, whiskered
Yanguesian, strapped cuttingly to a mule, and a paunchy shovel-
hatted Carmelite, who hugged a crucifix between his roomy sleeves.
Ducos had heard of these banded vengeresses. Now, he was
Frenchman enough to appreciate in full the significance of their
attitude, as they clustered beneath him in the dusk, a veiled and
voiceless huddle of phantoms. “How,” he thought, peeping through
the dropped curtain of his hair, “will the adorables do it?” He had an
hysterical inclination to laugh, and at that moment the monk, with a
sudden decision to action, brushed against him and set him slowly
twirling until his face was averted from the show.
Immediately thereon—as he interpreted sounds—the mule was
led under the gallows. He heard the ladder placed in position, heard
a strenuous shuffling as of concentrated movement. What he failed
to hear (at present) was any cry or protest from the victim. The beam
above creaked, a bridle tinkled, a lighter drop of hoofs receded. A
pregnant pause ensued, broken only by a slight noise, like rustling or
vibrating—and then, in an instant, by a voice, chuckling, hateful—the
voice of the priest.
“What! to hang there without a word, Carlos? Wouldst thou go,
and never ask what is become of that very treasure thou soldst thy
soul to betray? The devil has rounded on thee, Carlos; for after all it
is thou that art lost, and not the treasure. That is all put away—shout
it in the ears of thy neighbours up there—it is all put away, Carlos,
safe in the salt mines of the Little Hump. Cry it to the whole world
now. Thou mayst if thou canst. In the salt mines of the Little Hump.
Dost hear? Ah, then, we must make thee answer.”
With his words, the pit was all at once in shrill hubbub, noise
indescribable and dreadful, the shrieking of harpies bidden to their
prey. It rose demoniac—a very Walpurgis.
“No, no,” thought Ducos, gulping under his collar. He was almost
unnerved for the moment. “It is unlawful—they have no right to!”
He was twisting again, for all his mad will to prevent it. He would
not look, and yet he looked. The monk, possessed, was thrashing
the torn and twitching rubbish with his crucifix. The others, their
fingers busy with the bodkins they had plucked from their mantillas,
had retreated for the moment to a little distance.
Suddenly the Carmelite, as if in an uncontrollable frenzy, dropped
his weapon, and scuttling to the mule, where it stood near at hand,
tore a great horse pistol from its holster among the trappings, and
pointed it at the insensible body.
“Scum of all devils!” he bellowed. “In fire descend to fire that lasts
eternal!”
He pulled the trigger. There was a flash and shattering explosion.
A blazing hornet stung Ducos in the leg. He may have started and
shrieked. Any cry or motion of his must have passed unnoticed in the
screaming panic evoked of the crash. He clung on with his hands
and dared to raise his head. The mouth of the pass was dusk with
flying skirts. Upon the sands beneath him, the body of the priest, a
shapeless bulk, was slowly subsiding and settling, one fat fist of it yet
gripping the stock of a pistol which, overgorged, had burst as it was
discharged.
*****
The reek of the little tragedy had hardly dissipated before Ducos
found himself. The sentiment of revolt, deriving from his helpless
position, had been indeed but momentary. To feel his own
accessibility to torture, painted torture to him as an inhuman lust.
With the means to resist, or escape, at will, he might have sat long in
ambush watching it; even condoning it as an extravagant posture of
art.
With a heart full of such exultation over the success of his trick that
for the moment he forgot the pain of his wound, he hurriedly
unpicked the knots of the shorter cords about him, and, jumping to
the ground, waited until the shadow of a little depressed figure came
slinking across the sand towards him.
“Eugenio!” it whispered; “what has happened? O! art thou hurt?”
She ran into his arms, sobbing.
“I am hurt,” said Ducos. “Quick, child! unstrap this from my arm
and bind it about my calf. Didst hear? But it was magnificent! Two
birds with a single stone. The piastres in pickle for us. Didst see,
moreover? Holy Emperor! it was laughable. I would sacrifice a
decoration to be witness of the meeting of those two overhead. It
should be the Yanguesian for my money, for he has at least his teeth
left. Look how he shows them, bursting with rage! Quick, quick,
quick! we must be up and away, before any of those others think of
returning.”
“And if one should,” she said, “and mark the empty beam?”
“What does it matter, nevertheless! I must be off to-night, after
thou hast answered me one single question.”
“Off? Eugenio! O! not without me?”
“God, little girl! In this race I must not be hampered by so much as
a thought. But I will return for thee—never fear.”
 He still sat in his domino. She knelt at his feet, stanching the flow
from the wound the pistol had made in his leg. At his words she
looked up breathlessly into his face; then away, to hide her
swimming eyes. In the act she slunk down, making herself small in
the sand.
“Eugenio! My God! we are watched!”
He turned about quickly.
“Whence?”
“From the mouth of the pass,” she whispered.
“I can see nothing,” he said. “Hurry, nevertheless! What a time
thou art! There, it is enough of thy bungling fingers. Help me to my
feet and out of this place. Come!” he ended, angrily.
He had an ado to climb the easy slope. By the time they were
entered amongst the rocks and bushes above, it was black dusk.
“Whither wouldst thou, dearest?” whispered the goatherd.
He had known well enough a moment ago—to some point, in fact,
whence she could indicate to him the direction of the Little Hump,
where the treasure lay; afterwards, to the very hill-top where some
hours earlier they had forgathered. But he would not or could not
explain this. Some monstrous blight of gloom had seized his brain at
a swoop. He thought it must be one of the crows, and he stumbled
along, raving in his heart. If she offered to help him now, he would
tear his arm furiously from her touch. She wondered, poor stricken
thing, haunting him with tragic eyes. Then at last her misery and
desolation found voice—
“What have I done? I will not ask again to go with thee, if that is it.
It was only one little foolish cry of terror, most dear—that they should
suspect, and seize, and torture me. But, indeed, should they do it,
thou canst trust me to be silent.”
He stopped, swaying, and regarded her demoniacally. His face
was a livid and malignant blot in the thickening dusk. To torture her?
What torture could equal his at this moment? She sought merely to
move him by an affectation of self-renunciation. That, of course,
called at once for extreme punishment. He must bite and strangle
her to death.
He moved noiselessly upon her. She stood spellbound before him.
All at once something seemed to strike him on the head, and,