Keyword Search over Relational Databases: Issues, Approaches and Open Challenges

In this paper, we overview the main research approaches developed in the area of Keyword Search over Relational Databases. In particular, we model the process for solving keyword queries in three phases: the management of the user’s input, the search algorithms, the results returned to the user. For each phase we analyze the main problems, the solutions adopted by the most important system developed by researchers and the open challenges. Finally, we introduce two open issues related to multi-source scenarios and database sources handling instance not fully accessible.