Design and implementation of a graphical interface to XQuery

Abstract

As the use of XML is rapidly growing, a growing number of users without programming skills will need to query XML data. Although designed to be easily understood by humans, XQuery, the XML standard query language, has the typical syntax of programming languages, which most users dislike. In this paper we describe a graphical language (XQBE) inspired by "Query By Example" (QBE), a popular relational query language used by MS Access. XQBE covers a significant subset of XQuery and is supported by a prototype enabling the formulation of queries on a graphical interface and their translation into XQuery, thus providing non-trivial querying capabilities to a wide spectrum of users. Simple queries are easily represented in XQBE, but many "complex" queries allow as well for an intuitive graphical representation.