User-database interaction at the knowledge level of abstraction

Abstract Despite the widespread popularity of relational databases, it is still very difficult for trained users to formulate relational queries. The major cause of this difficulty is the fact that the user and the database system are forced to communicate using constructs that are not closely related to the user's world. This paper proposes and develops a new level of user-database interaction, the knowledge-level (KL) interface, where the user and the database system exchange only knowledge from the user's world. The data structure used in the database is fully hidden from the user. Under the new KL approach, the database system is no longer seen as a store of data. Rather, it is an agent to hold domain knowledge and provide it upon request. It is shown that the KL interface is in many ways better than the relational interface. Users of the KL interface need to know less and perform fewer data manipulation operations than users of the relational interface.

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