BANKS: Browsing and Keyword Searching in Relational Databases

Publisher Summary Browsing ANd Keyword Searching (BANKS) enables almost effortless Web publishing of relational and eXtensible Markup Language (XML) data that would otherwise remain (at least partially) invisible to the Web. Relational databases store large amounts of data that are queried using structured query languages. A user needs to know the underlying schema and the query language in order to make meaningful ad hoc queries on the data. This is a substantial barrier for casual users, such as users of Web-based information systems. HTML forms can be provided for predefined queries. A university Website may provide a form interface to search for faculty and students. Searching for departments would require yet another form, as would search for courses offered. However, creating an interface for each such task is laborious, and is also confusing to users since they must first expend effort finding which form to use. Furthermore, they are not suitable for ad hoc querying or exploratory browsing. Search engines on the Web have popularized an alternative unstructured querying and browsing paradigm that is simple and user-friendly. Users type in keywords and then follow hyperlinks to navigate from one document to the other. No knowledge of schema is needed. Keyword search can provide a very simple and easy-to-use mechanism for casual users to get information from databases.