An intranet mediator for obtaining direct answers to natural language questions
allowing users to search both a data warehouse of integrated/structured data sources
and unstructured data sources. The intranet mediator allows the user to obtain
an answer to a natural language question without having to surf the data sources
in which the answer might be contained, or without being limited to one specific
factual item return. The intranet mediator operates on the supposition that most
answers to business queries are contained within structured data sources which
have been integrated into the data warehouse thereby having common schema and known
contents. Preselection of the most relevant data source(s) is thus possible before
query output. Search of unstructured data is also performed for additional context
surrounding either the question or the answer. A direct answer is given in response
to the question. If desired, the intranet mediator may also display a list of data
sources where additional relevant information may be found.
