QUICK - A Graphical User Interface to

Formulating queries to access multiple databases can be a formidable task, especially when many terms from various databases and complex constraints are involved. To specify a multidatabase query, the user usually has to search through documents for exact database terms and learn the multidatabase language. This report presents QUICK (QUery Interface to CPL-Kleisli), a graphical user interface to multiple databases. CPL (Collection Programming Language) is a high-level multidatabase language built on top of an open query system Kleisli. QUICK allows users to handle overwhelming information from diierent data sources in an intuitive and uniform manner. The query speciication is reduced to specifying user's terms in his/her own world, selecting paths and specifying constraints in a graph. Through the terms entered by the user, QUICK is able to reduce the scope of the views and paths to only those that are relevant to answering the user's query. Furthermore, QUICK is able to automatically generate a CPL query that corresponds to the user's intent. Additional graphical functions are provided for the user to ne-tune the query generated.