A novel keyword search paradigm in relational databases: Object summaries

This paper introduces a novel keyword search paradigm in relational databases, where the result of a search is an Object Summary (OS). An OS summarizes all data held about a particular Data Subject (DS) in a database. More precisely, it is a tree with a tuple containing the keyword(s) as a root and neighboring tuples as children. In contrast to traditional relational keyword search, an OS comprises a more complete and therefore semantically meaningful set of information about the enquired DS. The proposed paradigm introduces the concept of Affinity in order to automatically generate OSs. More precisely, it investigates and quantifies the Affinity of relations (i.e. Affinity) and their attributes (i.e. Attribute Affinity) in order to decide which tuples and attributes to include in the OS. Experimental evaluation on the TPC-H and Northwind databases verifies the searching quality of the proposed paradigm on both large and small databases; precision, recall, f-score, CPU and space measures are presented. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.