Formalizing visual interaction with historical databases

  • Authors:

  • Sonia Fernandes Silva;Tiziana Catarci;Ulrich Schiel

  • Affiliations:

  • Department de Engenharia Elétrica, Universidade Federal da Paraíba C.P.10053, Campina Grande PB, Brazil;Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemística, Università di Roma "La Sapienza" I-00198, Rome, Italy;Department de Sistemas e Computacao, Universidade Federal da Paraíba, Av. Aprigo Veloso s/n-C.P.10106, Campina Grande, PB, 58109-970, Brazil

  • Venue:
  • Information Systems
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Recent database applications are typically oriented towards a large set of non-expert users, and therefore, they need to be equipped with suitable interfaces facilitating the interaction with the system. Moreover, the incorporation of the time dimension in database systems is a desirable feature. Indeed, several temporal data models and the corresponding textual query languages have been proposed. However, there is a limited amount of research concerning the investigation of user-oriented languages for querying temporal databases. Our proposal addresses such a need. In particular, we propose a visual query environment, namely Temporal Visual Query Environment (TVQE) which provides an easier interaction of the user with temporal databases. The system adopts a diagrammatic representation of the database schema (including temporal classes and relationships) and a "graphical notebook" as interaction metaphor. In our approach, non-database experts are released from syntactical difficulties which are typical of textual languages, and they can easily express temporal queries by means of elementary graphical operations (e.g. click on a node label). Differently from many proposals in the field of visual query languages, the language underlying TVQE is provided with formal syntax and semantics. It is based on a minimal set of temporal graphical primitives (TGPs), which are defined on a Temporal Graph Model (TGM), with visual syntax and object-based semantics. In this paper we mainly concentrate on the formal aspects of TVQE, and provide some hints on the visual interaction mechanisms and implementation issues.