In the 1980s, text-editing forced the shaping of the desktop metaphor and the now standard GUI paradigm. On the application side, increasing masses of information confronting a business or an individual have created a demand for information management applications. On the technology side, advances in interactive computer graphics hardware, coupled with low-cost mass storage, have created new possibilities for information retrieval systems in which UIs could play a more central role. UI innovations are often driven by a combination of technology advances and application demands. As the desktop metaphor popularised document management, so the new generation of interfaces will take database access out of the hands of a select few and give it to the many.
It has also become evident that the Xerox Star interface and its whole related genre do not provide the modern interface designer with the expressive power that is needed.
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The upsurge in the number of casual users and the general acceptance of computer technology has shown that the principal driving force in software engineering is shifting from functionality to usability. This paper will discuss our approach and the design of our interface AMAZE. 3D representations for both query construction and result representation have been developed. Interactive animated 3D graphics have been embedded inside a standard menu driven framework. We have used three dimensional graphical techniques to construct an interface for our object oriented database. Previous studies in visual query languages for database management systems have attempted to use solely the desktop metaphor. Nowhere is such a paradigm shift more needed than in visual query systems for databases. This allows implementations of Kaleidoquery to be used with any object database that conforms to the ODMG stan.Ī new revolution is occurring in graphical interface design with multimedia and virtual metaphors taking their place beside menus and dialogue boxes. Queries created with Kaleidoquery can be translated into ODMG version 2.0 Object Query Language (OQL). Keywords visual query language, 3D, OQL, ODMG, results visualisation 1 INTRODUCTION Kaleidoquery (Murray, Paton & Goble 1998) is a visual query language for ODMG (Object Data Management Group) compliant object databases (Cattell et al. These queries are then translated into the ODMG standard textual query language OQL for evaluation, the results of which can be viewed and browsed from within the Kaleidoscape environment. This paper describes a version of Kaleidoscape that allows the user to construct queries from within a 3D environment. Kaleidoscape is a three dimensional (3D) implementation of a data-flow oriented visual query language, which has been implemented in 3D to examine the advantages and disadvantages of such an interface paradigm over current WIMP GUIs. Furthermore, it develops Lyberworld towards a system which integrates and visualises data from various heterogeneous data sources. The approach presented within this paper integrates the Lyberworld concepts with the requirements for a visual interface to the VODAK database system. Posing queries against such a database is a complex task which requires profound knowledge of the database schema and a query language. In our most recent research work we are aiming at integrating the visualisation concepts of Lyberworld with the object oriented database system VODAK, a powerful tool to implement database applications which require a complex database schema.
Accessing database contents by using the visualisation metaphors search tree and relevance sphere has achieved two main benefits: first, the user can construct and pose queries much easier than using a query language and second, query results are presented in a way which in opposition to, e.g., tabular output displays the relations between the different queries and query results.
With the Lyberworld system a new approach offering the user a convenient interface to the data stored within an information retrieval system has been introduced.
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