PatMan: A Visual Database System to Manipulate Path Patterns and Data in Hierarchical Catalogs

Abstract. Hierarchical structures is a popular means of organizing data in Digital libraries for browsing and querying. Examples of such struc-tures are the catalogs which provide data organized in thematic hier-archies on a category/subcategory basis. Such hierarchies group data under certain properties. Navigational paths are the knowledge artifacts to represent such groups. We consider paths in hierarchies as patterns which provide a conceptual clustering of data in groups sharing common properties. Under this perspective, we have designed and implemented PatMan, a visual database system to manage hierarchical catalogs. The system can store navigational paths and data from hierarchical catalogs, and provides a pictorial query-by-example language to manipulate path patterns and data in a uniform way.