  As more and more collections of data are becoming available on the web to
everyone, non expert users demand easy ways to retrieve data from these
collections. One solution is the so called Visual Query Systems (VQS) where
queries are represented visually and users do not have to understand query
languages such as SQL or XQuery. In 1996, a paper by Catarci reviewed the
Visual Query Systems available until that year. In this paper, we review VQSs
from 1997 until now and try to determine whether they have been the solution
for non expert users. The short answer is no because very few systems have in
fact been used in real environments or as commercial tools. We have also
gathered basic features of VQSs such as the visual representation adopted to
present the reality of interest or the visual representation adopted to express
queries.
