Visual User Interfaces for Database Systems
The amount of information that is generated and becomes available in today's world is alarming. Large databases used to be available only in major corporations and organizations. Now the smallest of enterprises want to use databases to store their data, e.g., small companies record their day-to-day operation, individual scientists generate experimental data of large quantities, and of course, everybody places all kinds of information on the web, some of it under database control. Moreover, the conceptual structures (schemas) of the data that becomes available are increasing in complexity as well. In turn, this affects the queries that users want to pose on this data, whose complexity is also rising. These trends of information proliferation and increased database usage have resulted in a major expansion of the potential user base of database systems and have made prominent one of the primary inadequacies of such systems: their user interface. It is now urgently necessary to provide user interfaces that require much less database sophistication and expertise by the users than currently, but an adequate solution does not seem to be in sight. View online