The overall goal of this paper is to devise a flexible and declarative query language for specifying or describing particular knowledge discovery scenarios. We introduce one such language, called IQL. IQL is intended as a general, descriptive, declarative, extendable and implementable language for inductive querying that supports the mining of both local and global patterns, reasoning about inductive queries and query processing using logic, as well as the flexible incorporation of new primitives and solvers. IQL is an extension of the tuple relational calculus that includes functions as primitives. The language integrates ideas from several other declarative programming languages, such as pattern matching and function typing. We hope that it will be useful as an overall specification language for integrating data mining systems and principles.