A HYPERGRAPH-BASED FRAMEWORK FOR VISUAL INTERACTION WITH DATABASES

The advent of graphical workstations has led to a new generation of interaction tools in database systems, where the use of graphics greatly enhances the quality of the interaction. Yet, Visual Query Languages present some limitations, deriving partly from their own paradigm and partly from the available technology. One of the basic drawbacks is the lack of formalization, in contrast to the well-established traditional languages. In this paper we propose a theoretical framework for visual interaction with databases, having a particular kind of hypergraph, the Structure Modeling Hypergraph (SMH), as a representation tool, able to capture the features of existing data models. SMHs profit from the basic property of diagrams while overcoming their limitations. Notable characteristics of SMHs are: uniform and unified representation of intensional and extensional aspects of databases, direct representation of containment relationships, and immediate applicability of direct manipulation primitives. SMHs are not a new data model but a new representation language that provides the syntactic rules for describing the structuring mechanisms of data models. SMHs can be queried by formal systems closed under queries.