Formalizing visual interaction with historical databases |
| |
| Affiliation: | 1. Department de Engenharia Elétrica, Universidade Federal da Paraı́ba C.P.10053, Campina Grande PB, Brazil;2. Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemı́stica, Università di Roma “La Sapienza” I-00198, Rome, Italy;3. Department de Sistemas e Computação, Universidade Federal da Paraı́ba, Av. Aprigo Veloso s/n-C.P.10106, Campina Grande PB, 58109-970, Brazil;1. Institute of Fluorescent Probes for Biological Imaging, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, University of Jinan, Jinan, Shandong, 250022, PR China;2. Guangxi Key Laboratory of Electrochemical Energy Materials, Institute of Optical Materials and Chemical Biology, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Guangxi University, Nanning, Guangxi, 530004, PR China;1. Key Laboratory of Jiangxi Province for Persistent Pollutants Control and Resources Recycle, Nanchang Hangkong University, Nanchang 330063, China;2. CAS Key Laboratory of Design and Assembly of Functional Nano-structures, Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Nanomaterials, Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Fuzhou, Fujian 350002, China;1. School of Ophthalmology and Optometry, Eye Hospital, School of Biomedical Engineering, Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou, 325000, PR China;2. Wenzhou Institute, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wenzhou, 325000, PR China;3. Oujiang Laboratory, Wenzhou, 325000, PR China;4. Frontiers Science Center for Cell Responses, State Key Laboratory of Medicinal Chemical Biology, Key Laboratory of Bioactive Materials, Ministry of Education, And College of Life Sciences, Nankai University, China;5. International Joint Research Laboratory of Nano-Micro Architecture Chemistry (NMAC), College of Chemistry, Jilin University, Changchun, 130012, PR China;1. University of Alberta, Civil & Environmental Engineering, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada;2. Enbridge Liquids Pipelines, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada |
| |
| 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. |
| |
| Keywords: | |
| 本文献已被 ScienceDirect 等数据库收录！ |
|
