Searching, Analyzing and Exploring Databases

Abstract

Keyword based search, analysis and exploration enables users to easily access databases without the need to learn a structured query language and to study possibly complex data schemas. Supporting keyword based search, analysis and exploration on databases has become an emerging hot area in database research and development due to its substantial benefit. Researchers from different disciplines are working together to tackle various challenges in this area.

This tutorial aims at outlining the problem space of supporting keyword based search, analysis and exploration on databases, introducing representative and state-of-the-art techniques that address different aspects of the problem, and discussing further challenges and potential future research directions. The tutorial will provide the researchers and developers a systematic and organized view on the techniques related to this topic.

A tutorial with similar topic was given in SIGMOD 2009 [1], and was very well received. Since the research interest in keyword search on structured data is ever increasing and there are plenty of new techniques since then, this tutorial will be updated to incorporate the new findings in this area, which covers query processing, type ahead search, query suggestion, personalization, result comparison, faceted search, etc.