Perspectives and Views of Flexible Query Answering.

Flexible Query Answering Systems (FQAS) is a multidisciplinary research field at the crossroad of Information retrieval, databases, data mining, multimedia and geographic information systems, knowledge based systems, social networks, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and semantic web technologies, whose aim is to improve human ability to retrieve relevant information from databases, libraries, heterogeneous archives, the Web and the Web 2.0. The present paper has the objective to outline the perspectives and challenges offered by the heterogeneous panorama of current techniques.