Top-K keyword search for supporting semantics in relational databases

In order to enhance the search results of keyword search in relational databases, semantic relationship among relations and tuples is employed and a semantic ranking function is proposed. In addition to considering current ranking principles, the proposed semantic ranking function provides new metrics to measure query relevance. Based on it, two Top-k search algorithms BA (blocking algorithm) and EBA (early-stopping blocking algorithm) are presented. EBA improves BA by providing a filtering threshold to terminate iterations as early as possible. Finally, experimental results show the semantic ranking function guarantees a search result with high precision and recall, and the proposed BA and EBA algorithms improve query performance of existing approaches.