The query language of Abundantia Verborum was designed with similarity to existing languages as goal rather than originality. In spite of the fact that there are no standards in the field, many features, such as regular expressions and Boolean operators show up in many if not most full text search query languages. The design principles for the Abundantia Verborum query language were the following.
Because the first three items are, admittedly, rather vague and probably subjective, this text focuses on the other two, more tangible principles. Notably, the last one is the main topic of this text. We say that the query language in Abundantia Verborum has an open architecture because it has the following features:
These features were obtained by constructing the language as a typed language. This is discussed in 4.3.1 A typed query language. Although the use of types opens the doors for many possible extensions of the current language, some common types of search strategies at first sight do not clearly fit in: namely indexed and limited access strategies. These strategies, and their relation to Abundantia Verborum, are the topics of 4.3.2 Indexed search versus direct search and 4.3.3 Limited versus unlimited access.