Towards a Unified Visual Database Access.

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/sigmod/VadapartyAO93,
  author    = {Kumar V. Vadaparty and
               Y. Alp Aslandogan and
               Gultekin {\"O}zsoyoglu},
  editor    = {Peter Buneman and
               Sushil Jajodia},
  title     = {Towards a Unified Visual Database Access},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 1993 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on
               Management of Data, Washington, D.C., May 26-28, 1993},
  publisher = {ACM Press},
  year      = {1993},
  pages     = {357-366},
  ee        = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/170035.170087, db/conf/sigmod/VadapartyAO93.html},
  crossref  = {DBLP:conf/sigmod/93},
  bibsource = {DBLP, http://dblp.uni-trier.de}
}

Abstract

Since the development of QBE, over fifty visual query languages have been proposed to facilitate easy database access. Although these languages have introduced some very useful paradigms, a number of these have some severe limitations, such as: (a) not extending beyond the relational model (b) not considering negation and safety, formally (c) using ad hoc constructs, with no analysis of expressivity or complexity done, etc. Note that visual database access is an important issue being revisted, with the emergence of different flavers of object-oriented databases. We believe that there is a need for developing a unified visual query language.

Specifically, our goal is to develop a visual query language that has the following properties: (i) It has a few core constructs using which "expert-users" can define new (derived) constructs easily (ii) "Normal users" can use easily either the core or the derived constructs for database querying (iii) It can implement representative constructs of other (textual or visual) query language straightforwardly, and (iv) It has formal semantics, with its theoretical properties, such as complexity, analyzed.

We believe that we make a first step towards the above goal by introducing a new logical construct called restricted universal quantifier and combining it with the hierarchical structure of windows to develop a Visual Query Language, called VQL. The core constructs of VQL can encode easily a number of representative constructs of different (about six visual and four non-visual) relational, nested and object-oriented query languages. We also study the theoretical aspects such as safety, complexity, etc., of VQL.

Copyright © 1993 by the ACM, Inc., used by permission. Permission to make digital or hard copies is granted provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or direct commercial advantage, and that copies show this notice on the first page or initial screen of a display along with the full citation.

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Referenced by

1. Jeonghee Kim, Taisook Han, Suk Kyoon Lee: Visualization of Path Expressions in a Virtual Object-Oriented Database Query Language. DASFAA 1999: 99-108
2. Eric Andonoff, Gilles Hubert, Annig Le Parc: A Database Interface Integrating a Querying Language for Versions. ADBIS 1998: 200-211
3. Manoj Chavda, Peter T. Wood: Towards an ODMG-Compliant Visual Object Query Language. VLDB 1997: 456-465
4. Nevzat Hurkan Balkir, Eser Sükan, Gultekin Özsoyoglu, Z. Meral Özsoyoglu: VISUAL: A Graphical Icon-Based Query Language. ICDE 1996: 524-533