The list of terms on the top left hand side of the interface window represents the user's query as it changes during the session. Changes may take place through interactive query re-formulation, or dynamic term extraction and incremental query expansion. Clicking on a term produces a small pop-up menu allowing any term to be deleted and any thesaurus term to be used as a starting point for thesaurus navigation.
Query terms are displayed in different colours depending on their source: thesaurus terms are green, user-entered terms are maroon, and extracted terms are blue. As noted earlier in section 2.3.1, the same term may be derived from more than one source. For the ENQUIRE experiments it was considered most important to indicate to users that a term is a potential starting-point for thesaurus navigation and its colour is selected accordingly.
The title of the query area changes according to its state. When the list of terms is the exactly the same as the one used to retrieve the current hit-list it is called the Current Query. When any change has been made so that the two are no longer in step, its title becomes Working Query.