Dynamic generation of usable search interfaces for networked information systems

The protocols for networked information systems should provide a richer description of the query capabilities in order to permit the implementation of more usable search interfaces. This paper suggests to express this description with a formal grammar. A grammar is a powerful representation of the query capabilities, it can be easily transmitted, interpreted and manipulated automatically. A grammar can also be simply created and used for dynamically building search interfaces. This paper discusses these last two issues and presents appropriate methods for achieving these aims.