This thesis describes the Graph Object Access Language (GOAL) and optimization techniques to execute GOAL statements. GOAL can be used to retrieve information stored in an object-oriented database system modeled as an information graph. It is an extension of the LEND query language developed by Chen et aI. The expressive power of GOAL and the effectiveness of the optimization techniques have been demonstrated using the WordNet database. Queries for the database have been identified and formulated using GOAL. The effectiveness of the optimization techniques has been demonstrated for six typical query forms with randomly selected words. / Master of Science