Feasible database querying using a visual end-user approach

This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGCHI symposium on Engineering interactive computing systems, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1822018.1822047Querying databases is a common daily task carried out by a great deal of end-users who do not have specific skills in SQL language. Today, most of the database interaction is achieved by means of query interfaces provided by the database environment. However, most of these interfaces suffer from expressive limitations, since they are mostly based on metaphors that drastically restrict the expressiveness of the SQL language that is generated and executed in the background. In this paper, we present a visual interaction language and tool focused on easily querying databases by end-users. We make no assumption on the level of the user's experience with query languages, as our visual metaphor is intended for querying databases by unskilled end-users and also leveraging the restriction on the expressiveness of the queries created by them. We also report on some late braking results obtained by an experiment carried out with real users.The work reported in this paper is being partially supported by the founded projects TIN2008-02081/TIN and S2009/TIC-1650