Querying petrographic descriptions in an intelligent database system

This paper describes the query module of the Petrographer System. Petrographer is an intelligent database system that supports petrographic descriptions, diagenetic analysis and data management, using resources from expert systems and database technologies. Among the requirements of the application domain, includes to retrieve and to compare the information of a rock sample. In this way, a query interface for the application that provides the refinement progressive of a query in the database has been defined. The querying process proposed allows the user to define selection expressions based on rock sample features and hence view the results. The interface supports the basic requirements of the application and consists of a relevant tool for the system.