Hybrid Search Ranking for Structured and Unstructured Data

A growing amount of structured data is published on the Web and complements the textual content. Searching the textual content is performed primarily by the means of keyword queries and Information Retrieval methods. Structured data allow database-like queries for retrieval. Since structured and unstructured data occur often as a combination of both, are embedded in each other, or are complementary, the question of how search can take advantage of this hybrid data setting arises. Of particular interest is the question of how ranking as the algorithmic decision of what information is relevant for a given query can take structured and unstructured data into account by also allowing hybrid queries consisting of structured elements combined with keywords. I propose to investigate this question in the course of my PhD thesis.