A Multiparadigmatic Environment for Interacting with Databases

This paper mainly concentrates on the system prototype, in particular on its user-oriented features, also describing some preliminary usability trials. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces the system architecture. In Section 3 the formal basis of the multiparadigmatic approach are recalled. In Section 4 the visual representations and interaction mechanisms for the query phase are illustrated, also showing an example of interaction. Section 5 deals with the various visual mechanisms for the query result presentation. Section 6 is devoted to user-related topics, i.e. a description of the user model system component and a brief report on the usability trials. Finally, conclusions are drawn in Section 7