Towards an ODMG-Compliant Visual Object Query Language

We describe the design, implementation and user evaluation of QUIVER, a graph-based visual query language for object databases. The design goals of QUIVER include compliance to standards, comprehensive representational power, and consistency of visual representation. Compliance to standards is achieved through QUIVER queries being translated to OQL, the standard query language proposed by the Object Data Management Group (ODMG). Comprehensive representational power is gained by QUIVER supporting a significant number of object database constructs, including objects, literals, attributes, relationships, structures, collections, operations, (aggregate) functions, and subqueries. Consistency of visual representation is pursued by assigning similar visual representations to constructs with similar functionality, as well as by minimising the use of text in QUIVER queries. The language is implemented as a visual front-end to the 02 object database system. Results of a user evaluation suggest that users tid it easier to formulate correct queries in QUIVER than in OQL.

[1]  O. Deux,et al.  The Story of O2 , 1990, IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng..

[2]  Tom Atwood,et al.  Object Database Standard: ODMG-93, Release 1.2 , 1995 .

[3]  David J. Groggel,et al.  Nonparametric Methods for Quantitative Analysis , 1996, Technometrics.

[4]  Peter J. H. King,et al.  Syntax and Semantics of Gql, a graphical query language , 1995, J. Vis. Lang. Comput..

[5]  Alberto O. Mendelzon,et al.  Architecture and Applications of the Hy+ Visualization System , 1994, IBM Syst. J..

[6]  Narain H. Gehani,et al.  Queries in an Object-Oriented Graphical Interface , 1995, J. Vis. Lang. Comput..

[7]  Manoj Chavda.  Visually querying object-oriented databases , 1997 .

[8]  F. Staes,et al.  A graphical query language for object oriented databases , 1991, Proceedings 1991 IEEE Workshop on Visual Languages.

[9]  Alberto O. Mendelzon,et al.  A graphical query language supporting recursion , 1987, SIGMOD '87.

[10]  Gultekin Özsoyoglu,et al.  Towards a unified visual database access , 1993, SIGMOD '93.

[11]  Marc Gyssens,et al.  A graph-oriented object database model , 1990, IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng..

[12]  Rangasami L. Kashyap,et al.  A Visual Query Language for Graphical Interaction with Schema-Intensive Databases , 1993, IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng..

[13]  John K. Ousterhout,et al.  Tcl and the Tk Toolkit , 1994 .

[14]  Songchun Moon,et al.  Object query diagram: an extended query graph for object-oriented databases , 1993, Proceedings 1993 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages.

[15]  Levent V. Orman,et al.  A visual data model , 1992, Data Knowl. Eng..

[16]  Mark Levene,et al.  A nested-graph model for the representation and manipulation of complex objects , 1994, TOIS.