Symbiosis in the Intranet: How Document Retrieval Benefits from Database Information

The enterprise information space is split in two hemispheres. Documents contain unstructured or semistructured information; structured information is stored in databases. As regards the content, both kinds of information are complementary parts. However, enterprise information systems usually focus on one part, only. Our approach improves document retrieval in the intranet by exploiting the enterprise’s databases. In particular, we exploit database information to describe the context of documents and exploit this context to enhance common full text search. In this paper, we show how to model and compute document context and present results on runtime performance.