Thesis Title:  

 A Generic Menu-Based Interface for Web Querying

Thesis Abstract

    The World Wide Web is a fertile area that holds a very large amount of useful information. Millions of users access the Web daily searching for various types of needed information. Having the right information from the right interface is an important issue in Web querying field. While searching the web, earlier users had to be aware of various index servers that were deployed on the web to achieve an efficient information retrieval. In order to solve this problem, Web query languages that rely on Structured Query Language (SQL) were introduced such as: Web Structured Query Language (WebSQL) and Web Object Query Language (WebOQL) to extract data from the web. Nowadays, users differ in their proficiency and background knowledge. For those users who are not familiar with formal query languages and others, in this research we have developed a Generic Menu-Based Interface (GMBI) that provides good support and guidance on query formulation driven by a grammar-based control structure, to assist users. GMBI generates legitimate query step by step as menu choices, provides the users with the SQL query related to the search process, and retrieves the result and the data needed from the database back to the users. This supports users in remembering the query syntax and metadata, which does not require data processing and data structure knowledge. Preliminary, testing result showed that this work can simplify the job of the Web users and make their search more efficient in information context.

​​