Exploring Structured Information Systems: A Keyword Search Approach

Google search, and other search engines (e.g., Bing), provide a convenient way to find web pages that contain different keywords. Each web page is composed of loosely-structured paragraphs of text. On the other hand, a vast amount of information systems data are stored as structured data (e.g., in relational databases). In a structured database, the information about a particular entity, or the relation between different entities might be scattered across many rows and columns in different tables. These pieces of information must be stitched together to form the final answer to a user's query. For a large database, there might be millions of answers to a search query. Thus, finding the right answer is a challenging task. In this work, we present an intuitive search system over structured information systems. This search system empower non-technical users to explore structured information systems and turn hidden information into useful insights.