Database Selection Techniques for Routing Bibliographic Queries

Query routing refers to the general problem of selecting from a large set of accessible information sources the ones relevant to a given query(i.e. database selection), evaluating the query on the selected sources, and merging their results. As the number of information sources on the Internet increases dramatically, query routing is becoming increasingly important. Much of the previous work in query routing focused on information sources that are document collections. In this paper, we address the database selection problem for databases with multiple text attributes. In particular, we have proposed a number of different database selection techniques each requiring different types of knowledge about the databases' content, e.g. past queries, past query results, and statistical information collected from the database records. By conducting a series of experiments on a set of bibliographic databases, we evaluate and compare the performance of these proposed techniques. KEYWORDS: query r..