Keyword Search on Structured and Semi-Structured Data

Summary: Tutorial on keyword search across relational, XML, graph, streams, and workflows; covers result, ranking, top-k, snippets, clustering, and performance. Details keyword-search applications: db selection, query generation, analytics; outlines challenges. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 4255
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2009
Pagerank: 7.6078324e-05
Overall Rank: 3,239 | 77.78%
DOI: 10.1145/1559845.1559966

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Yi Chen (Arizona State University)
2. Wei Wang (National ICT Australia; University of New South Wales)
3. Ziyang Liu (Arizona State University)
4. Xuemin Lin (National ICT Australia; University of New South Wales)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{chen_sigmod09,
        title = {{Keyword Search on Structured and Semi-Structured Data}},
        author = {Chen, Yi and Wang, Wei and Liu, Ziyang and Lin, Xuemin},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '09},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/1559845.1559966},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1559845.1559966},
        year = {2009}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 9 of 9 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
4,494	Structured Annotations of Web Queries	2010	SIGMOD	6.6624281e-05
5,849	Summarizing Answer Graphs Induced by Keyword Queries	2013	VLDB	6.0666529e-05
5,976	Interactive Browsing and Navigation in Relational Databases	2016	VLDB	6.0219844e-05
7,005	Effective and Efficient Retrieval of Structured Entities	2020	VLDB	5.7269998e-05
8,277	Seaform: Search-As-You-Type in Forms	2010	VLDB	5.4574671e-05
8,329	Understanding Queries in a Search Database System	2010	PODS	5.4528142e-05
8,936	Toward Scalable Keyword Search over Relational Data	2010	VLDB	5.3483178e-05
9,832	The Data Interaction Game	2018	SIGMOD	5.2124469e-05
12,313	ColumbuScout: Towards Building Local Search Engines over Large Databases	2012	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 34 of 34 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
37	DISCOVER: Keyword Search in Relational Databases	2002	VLDB	0.00048017193
77	XRANK: Ranked Keyword Search over XML Documents	2003	SIGMOD	0.00037048607
212	Efficient IR-Style Keyword Search over Relational Databases	2003	VLDB	0.000247733
272	BLINKS: Ranked Keyword Searches on Graphs	2007	SIGMOD	0.00022695855
301	Proximity Search in Databases	1998	VLDB	0.00022032878
302	Bidirectional Expansion For Keyword Search on Graph Databases	2005	VLDB	0.00021963347
314	Making Database Systems Usable	2007	SIGMOD	0.00021574636
399	XSEarch: A Semantic Search Engine for XML	2003	VLDB	0.00019177959
496	Schema-Free XQuery	2004	VLDB	0.0001750537
748	Effective Keyword Search in Relational Databases	2006	SIGMOD	0.00014381224
795	Efficient Keyword Search for Smallest LCAs in XML Databases	2005	SIGMOD	0.00013939786
930	SPARK: Top-k Keyword Query in Relational Databases	2007	SIGMOD	0.0001312728
1,162	Principles of Dataspace Systems	2006	PODS	0.00011866011
1,182	SQAK: Doing More with Keywords	2008	SIGMOD	0.00011778765
1,429	Finding and Approximating Top-k Answers in Keyword Proximity Search	2006	PODS	0.00010811133
1,542	Keyword Proximity Search in Complex Data Graphs	2008	SIGMOD	0.00010421046
1,878	EASE: An Effective 3-in-1 Keyword Search Method for Unstructured, Semi-structured and Structured Data	2008	SIGMOD	9.5651166e-05
2,220	Identifying Meaningful Return Information for XML Keyword Search	2007	SIGMOD	8.9277765e-05
2,784	Towards Keyword-Driven Analytical Processing	2007	SIGMOD	8.1271176e-05
2,877	DB&IR: Both Sides Now (Extended Abstract)	2007	SIGMOD	8.0070039e-05
3,032	Learning to Create Data-Integrating Queries	2008	VLDB	7.8323614e-05
3,450	Keyword Search on External Memory Data Graphs	2008	VLDB	7.4038805e-05
4,318	XSeek: A Semantic XML Search Engine Using Keywords	2007	VLDB	6.7640367e-05
4,408	Reasoning and Identifying Relevant Matches for XML Keyword Search	2008	VLDB	6.7190081e-05
5,221	Query Biased Snippet Generation in XML Search	2008	SIGMOD	6.310752e-05
5,732	Effective Keyword-based Selection of Relational Databases	2007	SIGMOD	6.1064568e-05
5,840	DaNaLIX: a Domain-adaptive Natural Language Interface for Querying XML	2007	SIGMOD	6.0693725e-05
6,764	Keyword Query Cleaning	2008	VLDB	5.7810141e-05
6,909	NUITS: A Novel User Interface for Efficient Keyword Search over Databases	2006	VLDB	5.7414855e-05
8,333	Efficient Keyword Search over Virtual XML Views	2007	VLDB	5.4519621e-05
8,364	XML Full-Text Search: Challenges and Opportunities	2005	VLDB	5.4428499e-05
9,791	A Graph Method for Keyword-based Selection of the top-K Databases	2008	SIGMOD	5.2204332e-05
9,792	An Effective and Versatile Keyword Search Engine on Heterogenous Data Sources	2008	VLDB	5.2204332e-05
12,584	eXtract: A Snippet Generation System for XML Search	2008	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	4,131	Querying Complex Structured Databases	2007	VLDB
2	5,732	Effective Keyword-based Selection of Relational Databases	2007	SIGMOD
3	9,472	Indexing for Keyword Search with Structured Constraints	2023	PODS
4	1,555	Keyword Search in Databases: The Power of RDBMS	2009	SIGMOD
5	4,378	Keyword Search on Relational Data Streams	2007	SIGMOD
6	2,832	Expressive and Flexible Access to Web-Extracted Data: A Keyword-based Structured Query Language	2010	SIGMOD
7	8,920	Full-Power Graph Querying: State of the Art and Challenges	2023	VLDB
8	212	Efficient IR-Style Keyword Search over Relational Databases	2003	VLDB
9	748	Effective Keyword Search in Relational Databases	2006	SIGMOD
10	9,239	Keyword Querying and Ranking in Databases	2009	VLDB