Lum V.: GRADI: ‘A Graphical Database Interface for a Multimedia DBMS

In this paper we describe the GRAphical Database Interface (GRADI) of a Multi-media 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 incre-mental query specification, predefined joins and an additional ‘all’-operator are im-portant 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 multime-dia systems but for any database query interface