Keyword Search over Relational Databases: A Metadata Approach

Summary: Metadata-based framework for keyword search in relational DBs without precomputed indices or full content access. The method casts keyword-to-SQL translation as a joint assignment problem solved by the Hungarian algorithm, capturing inter-dependencies among keyword mappings and yielding semantically faithful SQL queries, with thorough experiments. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h285074971f4dbe13
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2011
Pagerank: 7.0448398e-05
Overall Rank: 3,730 | 75.00%
DOI: 10.1145/1989323.1989383

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Sonia Bergamaschi (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia)
2. Elton Domnori (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia)
3. Francesco Guerra (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia)
4. Raquel Trillo Lado (University of Zaragoza)
5. Yannis Velegrakis (University of Trento)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{bergamaschi_sigmod11,
        title = {{Keyword Search over Relational Databases: A Metadata Approach}},
        author = {Bergamaschi, Sonia and Domnori, Elton and Guerra, Francesco and Lado, Raquel Trillo and Velegrakis, Yannis},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '11},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/1989323.1989383},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1989323.1989383},
        year = {2011}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 10 of 10 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,217	SODA: Generating SQL for Business Users	2012	VLDB	0.00011464151
1,895	QUEST: A Keyword Search System for Relational Data based on Semantic and Machine Learning Techniques	2013	VLDB	9.4039774e-05
1,964	Exemplar Queries: Give me an Example of What You Need	2014	VLDB	9.2831855e-05
5,054	Actively Soliciting Feedback for Query Answers in Keyword Search-Based Data Integration	2013	VLDB	6.2842233e-05
5,160	Facilitating SQL Query Composition and Analysis	2020	SIGMOD	6.2354336e-05
6,157	DataXFormer: Leveraging the Web for Semantic Transformations	2015	CIDR	5.8532316e-05
8,020	Searching with XQ: the eXemplar Query Search Engine	2014	SIGMOD	5.38983e-05
12,434	Looking at Everything in Context	2015	CIDR	4.9605343e-05
12,463	Proactive Annotation Management in Relational Databases	2015	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
12,682	DrillBeyond: Enabling Business Analysts to Explore the Web of Open Data	2012	VLDB	4.9605343e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 14 of 14 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
24	Data Integration: A Theoretical Perspective	2002	PODS	0.00055201845
38	DISCOVER: Keyword Search in Relational Databases	2002	VLDB	0.00047300197
429	Translating Web Data	2002	VLDB	0.00018417669
509	Schema-Free XQuery	2004	VLDB	0.00017102298
777	Effective Keyword Search in Relational Databases	2006	SIGMOD	0.00014059304
947	SPARK: Top-k Keyword Query in Relational Databases	2007	SIGMOD	0.00012910239
1,177	SQAK: Doing More with Keywords	2008	SIGMOD	0.00011610316
1,312	Assisted Querying using Instant-Response Interfaces	2007	SIGMOD	0.00011061014
1,505	Keyword Search in Databases: The Power of RDBMS	2009	SIGMOD	0.00010424285
1,891	BANKS: Browsing and Keyword Searching in Relational Databases	2002	VLDB	9.4055639e-05
2,677	FleXPath: Flexible Structure and Full-Text Querying for XML	2004	SIGMOD	8.1266688e-05
2,757	Approximate XML Joins	2002	SIGMOD	8.0313227e-05
9,070	Measuring the Structural Similarity of Semistructured Documents Using Entropy	2007	VLDB	5.2121357e-05
12,797	Keymantic: Semantic Keyword-based Searching in Data Integration Systems	2010	VLDB	4.9605343e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	10,011	A Graph Method for Keyword-based Selection of the top-K Databases	2008	SIGMOD
2	3,323	Keyword Search on Structured and Semi-Structured Data	2009	SIGMOD
3	12,797	Keymantic: Semantic Keyword-based Searching in Data Integration Systems	2010	VLDB
4	9,447	Keyword Querying and Ranking in Databases	2009	VLDB
5	9,127	Toward Scalable Keyword Search over Relational Data	2010	VLDB
6	5,855	Effective Keyword-based Selection of Relational Databases	2007	SIGMOD
7	4,470	Keyword Search on Relational Data Streams	2007	SIGMOD
8	217	Efficient IR-Style Keyword Search over Relational Databases	2003	VLDB
9	1,505	Keyword Search in Databases: The Power of RDBMS	2009	SIGMOD
10	777	Effective Keyword Search in Relational Databases	2006	SIGMOD