Kaleidoscape: A 3D Environment for Querying ODMG Compliant Databases

Kaleidoscape is a three dimensional (3D) implementation of a data-flow oriented visual query language, which has been implemented in 3D to examine the advantages and disadvantages of such an interface paradigm over current WIMP GUIs. This paper describes a version of Kaleidoscape that allows the user to construct queries from within a 3D environment. These queries are then translated into the ODMG standard textual query language OQL for evaluation, the results of which can be viewed and browsed from within the Kaleidoscape environment. Keywords visual query language, 3D, OQL, ODMG, results visualisation 1 INTRODUCTION Kaleidoquery (Murray, Paton & Goble 1998) is a visual query language for ODMG (Object Data Management Group) compliant object databases (Cattell et al. 1997). Queries created with Kaleidoquery can be translated into ODMG version 2.0 Object Query Language (OQL). This allows implementations of Kaleidoquery to be used with any object database that conforms to the ODMG stan..