Integrating DB and IR Technologies: What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping?

Databases (DB) and information retrieval (IR) have evolved as separate fields. However, modern applications such as customer support, health care, and digital libraries require capabilities for both data and text management. In such settings, traditional DB queries, in SQL or XQuery, are not flexible enough to handle applicationspecific scoring and ranking. IR systems, on the other hand, lack efficient support for handling structured parts of the data and metadata, and do not give the application developer adequate control over the ranking function. This paper analyzes the requirements of advanced text- and data-rich applications for an integrated platform. The core functionality must be manageable, and the API should be easy to program against. A particularly important issue that we highlight is how to reconcile flexibility in scoring and ranking models with optimizability, in order to accommodate a wide variety of target applications efficiently. We discuss whether such a system needs to be designed from scratch, or can be incrementally built on top of existing architectures. The results of our analyses are cast into a series of challenges to the DB and IR communities.