Towards heterogeneous keyword search
Chunbin Lin, Jianguo Wang, Chuitian Rong · 2017
Keyword search is a widely popular mechanism for query processing that alleviates users from understanding complex data structures and learning query languages. Existing keyword search systems are designed and tuned for one specific data model. In big data era, data is usually resident in heterogeneous data sources including unstructured data, semi-structured data and structured data. In order to obtain complete and meaningful results, a system is required to perform keyword search queries upon diverse data sources rather than just one type of data sources. One possible approach is to send the keyword query to all the systems simultaneously, then integrate the returned answers from each data source to obtain final answers. However, answers from different data sources have different formats and may contain duplicates, which yields the heterogeneous search challenge.