Querying any information system requires the knowledge of some formal language, making it inaccessible to computer-naive potential users. We propose a new intuitive querying mechanism where the query is a (well-formed) table. We extract the underlying logical structure of the table to retrieve values from a database. Query tables are interpreted to perform simple SELECT & JOIN operations. We demonstrate that query tables with different layouts but with the same underlying logical structure yield correct answers. This approach can be extended to form complicated conditional queries and queries involving aggregates.
['Raghav K. Padmanabhan', 'George Nagy']
Query by table