EasyQuerier: A keyword based interface for web database integration system

Abstract

Recently a lot of work on integrating the search interfaces of multiple Web databases of the same domain into an integrated interface has been reported. Such integrated interfaces enable users to search multiple Web databases using one query. However, there are two potential problems when using these integrated interfaces in practice. First, if the number of domains is large, it may be difficult for users to find the correct domain. Second, the integrated interfaces can become too complicated for ordinary users to use. In this paper, we propose a system called EasyQuerier to tackle these problems. EasyQuerier allows the users to submit keyword-based queries to access the Web databases by first mapping a keyword-based user query to a suitable domain and then translating the user query to a well-formatted query on the integrated interface of the found domain. Our experiments show that both our domain mapping and query translation techniques work very well. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.