Current Geographic Information Systems (gis) lack, to a large extent, support for spatial searches in which a user wants to find a configuration of objects described in qualitative terms. At the database level, these searches can be supported by providing new spatial operators that can capture the semantics of the qualitative spatial relations used in the description and by developing resolution strategies tailored for queries including these operators. We suggest a technical approach to include an open number of qualitative spatial relations in gis and discuss a processing workflow leading from a qualitative spatial description to a database query and to the search result. We present and empirically evaluate a resolution strategy for these queries that is based on hypergraph matching and that exploits their semantic and structural characteristics. Finally, we envision some realizations of these searches and discuss challenges that relate to the cognitive aspect.