Keyword Search Across Databases and Documents

Given the continuous growth of databases and the abundance of diverse files in modern IT environments, there is a pressing need to integrate keyword search on heterogeneous information sources. A particular case in which such integration is needed occurs when a collection of documents (e.g., word processing documents, spreadsheets, text files and so on) is derived directly from a central database, and both repositories are independently updated. Finding hidden relationships between documents and databases is difficult, given the loose connection between them. This problem is especially complicated when database integration techniques must be extended to handle semi-structured data (i.e., documents).