Extending Keyword Search to Metadata on Relational Databases

Abstract

Keyword search is familiar to general users as the most popular information retrieval method, especially for searching on the Web because of its user-friendly way. In recent years various approaches to free-form keyword search over RDBMS have been proposed. They can produce results across multiple tuples in different relations according to a query consisting of a set of keywords. However, they just consider keyword search for values in tuple instances. In fact users have requirements to search keywords which may be part of the metadata of the database such as names of relations or attributes. In this paper, we extend keyword search on relational database. We define a tuple with annotation as an extension concept of a conventional tuple. In addition we add proposed weight to tuples. The weight function also cares about metadata information. We implement the query processing scheme in RDBMS in order to prove the proposed approach.