Towards a Flexible Database Interrogation

In this paper, we are interested in the use of domain ontologies as a semantic enrichment for traditional databases. Our first aim is to help the user in his search when his initial query doesn’t return any result. So, we propose a solution based on two different approaches allowing the user to express his interrogation in a relatively free way. The first approach detects and resolves naming and schematic conflicts. It is an ontological approach for SQL query expansion generating a set of queries. The second one is a join detection approach to eventually add all missed constraints in each generated query.