Visual query systems (VQSs) are query systems for databases that use visual representations to depict the domain of interest and express related requests. VQSs can be seen as an evolution of query languages adopted into database management systems; they are designed to improve the effectiveness of the human-computer communication. Thus, their most important features are those that determine the nature of the human-computer dialogue. In order to survey and compare existing VQSs used for querying traditional databases, we first introduce a classification based on such features, namely the adopted visual representations and the interaction strategies. We then identify several user types and match the VQS classes against them, in order to understand which kind of system may be suitable for each kind of user. We also report usability experiments which support our claims. Finally, some of the most important open problems in the VQS area are described. 1.

This paper describes the design and implementation of PESTO (Portable Explorer of STructured Objects), a user interface that supports browsing and querying of object databases. PESTO allows users to navigate the relationships that exist among objects. In addition, users can formulate complex object queries through an integrated query paradigm ("query-in-place") that presents querying as a natural extension of browsing. PESTO is designed to be portable to any object database system that supports a high-level query language; in addition, PESTO is extensible, providing hooks for specialized predicate formation and object display tools for new data types (e.g., images or text). 1 Introduction The Garlic project at the IBM Almaden Research Center [Care95] is developing a system and associated tools for managing large quantities of heterogeneous multimedia information. The goal of Garlic is to permit both traditional and multimedia data residing in a variety of existing data repositories ...

OdeView is the graphical front end for Ode, an object-oriented database system and environment. Ode's data model supports data encapsulation, type inheritance, and complex objects. OdeView provides facilities for examining the database schema (i.e., the object type or class hierarchy), examining class definitions, browsing objects, following chains of references starting from an object, synchronized browsing, displaying selected portions of objects (projection), and retrieving objects with specific characteristics (selection). OdeView does not need to know about the internals of Ode objects. Consequently, the internals of specific classes are not hardwired into OdeView and new classes can be added to the Ode database without requiring any changes to or recompilation of OdeView. Just as OdeView does not know about the object internals, class functions (methods) for displaying objects are written without knowing about the specifics of the windowing software used by OdeView or the graphi...

A form-based service is one in which the flow of data between service and user is described by a sequence of query/response interactions, or forms. Mawl is a domain-specific language for programming form-based services in a device-independent manner. We focus on Mawl's form abstraction, which is the means for separating service logic from user interface description, and show how this simple abstraction addresses seven issues in service creation, analysis, and maintenance: compile-time guarantees, implementation flexibility, rapid prototyping, testing and validation, support for multiple devices, composition of services, and usage analysis.

this paper, we describe the user interface and implementation of the application, give the rationale for our design choices, describe our experience with the tools and techniques used in the implementation, and present conclusions and directions for future work. Key Words: CSCW, distributed objects, groupware, office automation, mail systems, user interfaces, views. INTRODUCTION

It is one of the distinguishing characteristics of workflow management systems to integrate automated processes with human processes in an application system. The way a human process is modelled in a workflow system is by capturing the significant events of the process. These events include notifying the user who is assigned to perform the process, disseminating information that is necessary for the user to carry out the process, and collecting information that is generated as the result of the user process. Such events are often presented to the user or captured from the user using forms. This paper presents a form management system that is part of the Vicomte workflow management system. The major components include a form specification language, a facility for dynamically generating HTML pages with client-side validation to be used over the internet, as well as processing modules for the generated HTML pages on the server side. The architecture of the form management system is rather...

Office-by-Example (OBE) is an integrated office information system that has been under development at IBM Research. OBE, an extension of Query-by-Example, supports various office features such as database tables, word processing, electronic mail, graphics, images, and so forth. These seemingly heterogeneous features are integrated through a language feature called example elements. Applica-tions involving example elements are processed by the database manager, an integrated part of the OBE system. In this paper we describe the facilities and architecture of the OBE system and discuss the techniques for integrating heterogeneous objects. Categories and Subject Descriptors: D.3.4 [Programming Languages]: Processors-parsing; D.4.1 [Operating Systems]: Process Management-concurrency; E.2 [Data Storage Representations]: H.1.2 [Models and Principles]: User/Machine Systems--human factors; H.2.0 [Database Man-

This paper presents the graphical user interface InterBaseView for InterBase [ECD + 92], a multidatabase system processing global applications written in the InterBase Parallel Language (IPL) [BCC + 92] and accessing data from heterogeneous database and file systems. The primary design objective of InterBaseView is to provide users with convenience and confidence in interacting with InterBase. InterBaseView consists of an execution interface and an IPL program editor. During the execution of an IPL transaction program, the execution interface displays the execution history, the dependence relations among subtransactions, the intermediate results, and the final results. It can also request input from users at run-time through dialog windows. From a group of successful acceptable alternative subtransaction sets for a global transaction, a user can select the preferred alternative to commit the global transaction, thus supporting Flex transactions [ELLR90]. Additionally, t...

We describe how development productivity for multi-tier webbased database ‘forms ’ oriented applications can be significantly improved using ‘InstantApps’, an interpretive framework that uses efficient runtime model interpretation and features an integrated ‘wysiwig ’ ‘point-and click ’ design editor for developing forms, database schema, control flow, and functional logic. As compared to related academic as well as commercial work, our approach has the distinct advantage of retaining an industry standard architecture that yields high performance and enables model driven functionality to be augmented with hand-written extensions using a well known architectural style and leveraging standard skill sets. In particular, the interface’s ‘look and feel ’ can be completely custom built even as the application functionality is developed using the instant ‘WYSIWYG ’ editor. Efficient implementation of interpretation and reflection ensures that performance does not suffer, and performance benchmarks support this. Significant productivity benefits are demonstrated with case-studies of real-life applications developed and deployed on this platform, including actual costs vs. estimates using industry-standard function-point based measures. Finally, we describe some interesting features of the platform, including multi-tenancy and weak meta-circularity, and how these are being exploited successfully in practice.