Supporting Ontology-Driven Keyword Search over Relational Databases

Keyword Search Over Relational Databases (KSORDB) provides an easy way for casual users to access relational databases using a set of keywords. Although much research has been done and several prototypes have been developed recently, most of this research implements exact (also called syntactic or keyword) match. So, if there is a vocabulary mismatch, the user cannot get an answer although the database may contain relevant data. In this paper we propose a system that overcomes this issue. The proposed system extends existing schema-free KSORDB systems with semantic match features. It exploits domain ontology to progressively return related terms that can be used to retrieve more relevant answers to user. Experimental results show that the semantic search method, employed by the proposed system, is more effective than the traditional keyword search method, employed by the existing schema-free KSORDB systems, in terms of the recall rate of the retrieved results.