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A Survey on Visual Query Systems in the Web Era

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Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 9828))

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Abstract

As more and more collections of data are becoming available on the web to everyone, non expert users demand easy ways to retrieve data from these collections. One solution is the so called Visual Query Systems (VQS) where queries are represented visually and users do not have to understand query languages such as SQL or XQuery. In 1996, a paper by Catarci reviewed the Visual Query Systems available until that year. In this paper, we review VQSs from 1997 until now and try to determine whether they have been the solution for non expert users. The short answer is no because very few systems have in fact been used in real environments or as commercial tools. We have also gathered basic features of VQSs such as the visual representation adopted to present the reality of interest or the visual representation adopted to express queries.

The author would like to thank Rafael Bello for making the initial collection of papers for this review.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dpto. de Informática e Ingeniería de Sistemas, Facultad de Ciencias, Edificio de Matemáticas, Universidad de Zaragoza, 50009, Zaragoza, Spain

    Jorge Lloret-Gazo

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  1. Jorge Lloret-Gazo
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Correspondence to Jorge Lloret-Gazo .

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  1. Clausthal University of Technology, Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Germany

    Sven Hartmann

  2. Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

    Hui Ma

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Lloret-Gazo, J. (2016). A Survey on Visual Query Systems in the Web Era. In: Hartmann, S., Ma, H. (eds) Database and Expert Systems Applications. DEXA 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9828. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44406-2_28

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44406-2_28

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