No IFs, ANDs, or ORs: a study of databases querying
International Journal of Man-Machine Studies
A direct manipulation interface for boolean information retrieval via natural language query
SIGIR '90 Proceedings of the 13th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
A visual language for sketching large and complex interactive designs
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Journal of Visual Languages and Computing
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The accurate formulation of boolean expressions is a notorious problem in programming languages as well as database and web query tools. Users have demonstrated great difficulty with the common textual method for specifying these queries, which uses the boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT, partly because these words are used inconsistently in natural languages. This paper proposes a tabular boolean query language that avoids the need to use named operators, provides a concrete distinction between conjunction and disjunction, and makes grouping more explicit. A study comparing this tabular language with textual boolean expressions found that untrained users perform better when they express their queries in the tabular language, and about equally well when interpreting queries written in either language. We conclude that systems can benefit by adopting a tabular notation for query formulation.