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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 4531–4538Cite as

Visual Query Language

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Synonyms

Visual query system

Definition

Visual query languages (VQLs) are languages for querying databases that use a visual representation to depict the domain of interest and express related requests. VQLs provide a language to express the queries in a visual format, and they are oriented toward a wide spectrum of users, especially novices who have limited computer expertise and generally ignore the inner structure of the accessed database. Systems implementing VQLs are usually called visual query systems (VQSs) [1].

Historical Background

The birth of VQLs was due to several needs, including providing a friendly human-computer interaction, allowing database search by nontechnical users, and introducing a mechanism for comfortable navigation even in case of incomplete and ambiguous queries. It is worth noting that the real precursor of VQLs was QBE, already proposed by Moshe Zloof in 1977 [2].

QBE was really ahead of its time. Indeed, the Zloof’s paper states: “the formulation of a...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Ingegneria Informatica, Automatica e Gestionale “A.Ruberti”, Sapienza – Università di Roma, Rome, Italy

    Tiziana Catarci

Authors
  1. Tiziana Catarci
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Correspondence to Tiziana Catarci .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Dept. di Ingegneria Informatica, Automatica e Gestionale, Universita di Roma, Roma, 185, Italy

    Tiziana Catarci

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Catarci, T. (2018). Visual Query Language. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_448

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