A Metadata Search Approach to Keyword Search in Relational Databases

Search engines on the Web have popularized the keyword-based search paradigm, while searching in databases users need to know a database schema and a query language. Keyword search techniques on the Web cannot directly be applied to databases because the data on the Internet and database are in different forms. Moreover, existing systems for keyword searching limit type of keywords to database value terms. Thus, this research aims to propose a new method for keyword searching in databases which allows users to search either with database value terms, metadata terms or user terms. The metadata model accommodates these terms as well as underlying database semantics.