Ski: A Semantics-Knowledgeable Interface

The Semantics-Knowledgeable Interface (Ski) is designed to provide a powerful - but usable - interface to databases. To do this, it combines the expressiveness of semantic models, the broad communications “bandwidth” of graphics, and a novel approach to the representation and manipulation of database schemas. 1. lIltroduction This paper describes a database interface which is under construction. Ski, the Semantics-Knowledgeable Interface, is built on top of an existing semantic database implementation called the Semantic Database Constructor (see [FKM84]). Ski is intended as a naive interfade, but allows access to a full semantic data deflnition and manipulation language called Semdal (see [KS34]). The implementation, language, and interface together form a semantic DBMS called Sembase. Sembase is based on a semantic model. Semantic modeling in general is discussed in [KB84b]; briefly, semantic database models use a semantic network approach in providing data modeling constructs which ere more expressive than traditional data models (i.e., relational, hierarchical, network). A semantic model rovides facilities for detiing non-atomic objects P abstraction) through attributes and for constructing type/subtype hierarchies (generalization). The model under1 ‘ng Sembase is described in more detail in [KMBZj?and [KMEMa]. The next section provides a brief overview of Ski. Section 3 describes the screen layout of Ski. Due to space limitations a simple example, rather than a complete system description, is given in Section 4. This work was supported