We have presented motivations for and approaches toward integrating the historically separated DB and IR methodologies. While deep DB/IR integration may be wishful thinking, at least for the time being, we observe strong trends toward adopting IR concepts in the DB world and vice versa. In addition to applications that must be able to manage structured and unstructured data or highly heterogeneous information sources, we also see increasing interest and success inrnextracting entities and relationships from text sources. The envisioned path toward automatically building and growing comprehensive knowledge bases with expressive search and ranking capabilities may take a long time to mature. In any case, it is an exciting and rewarding challenge that should appeal to and benefit from innovation in several research communities, most notably DB and IR.
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