Resumen
This article's aim is to advocate for the integration of database systems (DB) and information-retrieval (IR) methods to address applications that are emerging from the ongoing explosion and diversification of digital information. One grand goal of such an endeavor is the automatic building and maintenance of a comprehensive knowledge base of facts from encyclopedic sources and the scientific literature. Facts should be represented in terms of typed entities and relationships and allow expressive queries that return ranked results with precision in an efficient and scalable manner. The article thus explores how DB and IR methods might contribute toward this ambitious goal. Here are DB and IR concepts and methods a developer would find useful: 1. approximate matching and record linkage, 2. too-many-answers ranking, 3. schema relaxation and heterogeneity, 4. information extraction and uncertain data, and 5. entity search and ranking.