Practical Approaches to the Many-Answer Problem

Database systems are increasingly used for interactive and exploratory data retrieval. In such retrievals, users’ queries often result in too many answers, so users waste significant time and efforts sifting and sorting through these answers to find the relevant ones. This chapter first reviews and discusses several research efforts that have attempted to provide users with effective and efficient ways to access databases. Then, it focuses on a simple but useful strategy for retrieving relevant answers accurately and quickly without being distracted by irrelevant ones. Generally speaking, the chapter presents a very recent but promising approach to quickly provide users with structured and approximate representations of their query results, a must have for decision support systems. The underlying algorithm operates on pre-computed knowledge-based summaries of the queried data, instead of raw data themselves. Thus, this first-citizen data structure is also presented in this chapter.