Mining approximate functional dependencies and concept similarities to answer imprecise queries

Current approaches for answering queries with imprecise constraints require users to provide distance metrics and importance measures for attributes of interest. In this paper we focus on providing a domain and end-user independent solution for supporting imprecise queries over Web databases without affecting the underlying database. We propose a query processing framework that integrates techniques from IR and database research to efficiently determine answers for imprecise queries. We mine and use approximate functional dependencies between attributes to create precise queries having tuples relevant to the given imprecise query. An approach to automatically estimate the semantic distances between values of categorical attributes is also proposed. We provide preliminary results showing the utility of our approach.