Room 3258 AVW Bldg. Formulating queries over complex databases can be a difficult task requiring extensive syntactic and semantic knowledge. Syntactic knowledge is needed to ensure that a query is well-formed and references existing relations and attributes.
Semantic knowledge is needed to ensure that a query satisfies user intent.
While a user often has a general understanding of the contents of the database, design decisions to structure and store data in optimal ways may conflict with the user's intuition or expectations. Consequently, database specialists are needed to formulate queries, and ad hoc access to the database is impeded. This presentation describes a research project in automated query formulation that significantly reduces the amount of knowledge required by database users. By using knowledge of the target query language, syntactically correct queries are assured. Similarly, by using a knowledge-rich conceptual model of the database, the most likely intent of a request can be inferred and generated queries can be semantically optimized.