GRADI: A Graphical Database Interface for a Multimedia DBMS

Abstract

In this paper we describe the GRAphical Database Interface (GRADI) of a Multimedia Database Management System. As generally true, the user interface is an important part of the system which strongly determines the effectiveness of using it. In order to find an easy and natural way of interacting with the MDBMS system we examined the query specification process used by humans. We found that incremental query specification, predefined joins and an additional 'all'-operator are important to improve the process of query specification making it considerably easier to use compared to query languages like SQL. The Graphical Database Interface described in this paper incorporates the mentioned capabilities as part of the MD-BMS system. We think that the principles are of general use not only for multimedia systems but for any database query interface.

Visual feedback in querying large databases

“…The first step is to specify a query. The user may use traditional query languages such as SQL or graphical user interfaces such as GRADI [KL92]. Since any existing query interface may be used in this step and since it has basically no impact on our system, we do not elaborate on this step but focus on the following steps: visualization of results and query modification.…”

“…One approach are graphical database interfaces that allow the user to browse the data (e.g. BAROQUE [Mot86], FLEX [Mot90] or GRADI [KL92]). In general, these systems only support the user in browsing the resulting data and in finding errors made because of not knowing the database system, the data model and query language, and/or the schema of the database.…”