Millions of users submit queries to search engines, provider websites, or merchant websites every day. Often the users are looking for information that is stored as structured data. Many merchants and providers store information about their products and services as structured data such as tables of attributes having various values associated with the products and services. Examples of structured data include product catalogs, travel databases about hotels, airlines or rental cars databases, and image databases.
While storing information as structured data may make it easier to use the data to populate webpages or catalogs or to generate reports, for example, the use of structured data may cause problems with respect to traditional keyword based methods for fulfilling queries. Typically, the language used by users posing queries is different from the representation used in the underlying structured data. For example, the query “brown sweater” may fail to match a product having structured data that includes the color “chestnut” using traditional text based or keyword based searching methods even though the product may in fact be relevant to the query.