A system named DAVID has been proposed and partially implemented which is designed to help the user in defining and manipulating his own view on a (relational) database of hierarchically related data items. DAVID resolves any incomplete or ambiguous requests by a sequence of questions to the user which have to be answered by “yes” or “no” confirming or denying the conjectures of DAVID. The text of these questions is based on simple statements by the database administrator on the semantic relations between entity types and their data items. The system is able, for example, to find the correct field among a number of equally named fields related to different entity types. Once the user’s view is set up, queries to the database can be issued by specifying the permitted values or ranges of some variables. It seems that the user has to know the correct field names but not the structure of the database.