Interactive Query Formulation in Semistructured Databases

The use of large amounts of distributed and heterogeneous information has become extremely cumbersome; this difficulty is mainly related to exploring the data, rather than actually storing or exchanging it. The user who is interested in small bits of information is getting more and more confused when having to dig under a large volume of diverse and more importantly semi-structured data. In this paper, we propose an interactive and adaptive framework that guides the user in the search for data, by disclosing only a part of the underlying information at a time. It first provides the user with a high-level view of the raw data and gradually adapts to his/her needs in order to offer a refined answer. The proposed model offers the possibility to query a semistructured database based on general schema-related constraints imposed by the user or identified by the system, but without specific knowledge of the underlying metadata. This is achieved by receiving initially an amorphic query, which may consist of one or more basic paths, and helping the user to refine it gradually to a specific semistructured query, expressed in a language like XQuery or Lorel.