DBFIRE: USING DATABASE QUERIES FOR INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

Resumo

Databases and documents are normally controlled by different systems, which usually do not communicate with each other: Database Management Systems (DBMS) and Information Retrieval Systems (IRS), respectively. Still, it is very likely that they store information about the same entities, which is a strong appeal for their integration. In this paper, we present an approach for DBMS/IRS integration that uses top-ranked terms in a DBMS query as keywords for an IRS search, in order to retrieve documents somehow related to the query. These terms “expand” an initial keyword set provided by the user, and are ranked according to a measure of their diffusion over the database query result. Experiments show that the approach presents significant improvements compared to other integration methods.