Several approaches have been proposed to provide access to data which is spread across different sources. Prominent among these are the approaches taken in federated systems and multidatabase systems. The main thrust is to provide the user with a mechanism to access several databases in a unified way. However, in all these systems the user is not isolated from specifying the path expressions in the query. In our system, we propose a query language, Structure Independent Query Language (SIQL), which has no reference to the structure of the databases. The structure is arrived at by the system by using the component databases that are registered with it. In general, there can be multiple queries that can be generated for a user query. We define ‘closeness’ criterion which imposes a ordering on the queries that can be generated. The queries are generated and executed according to this ordering and the result is presented to the user.