Using document space for relational search

In this paper, we present a family of methods and algorithms to efficiently integrate text indexing and keyword search from information retrieval to support search in relational databases. We propose a bi-directional transformation that maps relational database instances to document collections. The transformation is shown to be a homomorphism of keyword search. Thus, any search of tuple networks by a keyword query can be efficiently executed as a search for documents, and vice versa. By this construction, we demonstrate that indexing and search technologies developed for documents can naturally be reduced and integrated into relational database systems.