A Survey on Visual Query Systems in the Web Era (extended version)

TL;DR

This survey reviews the development of Visual Query Systems (VQS) from 1997 onward, analyzing their features and real-world adoption, concluding that they have not yet become mainstream tools for non-expert users.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of VQS evolution, features, and adoption challenges, updating prior surveys and highlighting gaps in practical usage.

Findings

Few VQSs are used in real environments

Most VQSs do not reach commercial deployment

Visual representations vary widely among systems

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.