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In this paper we describe the GRAphical Database Interface (GRADI) of a Multimedia Database Management System. As generally true, the user interface is an important part of a system which strongly determines the effectiveness of using it. In order to find a natural way of interacting with the MDBMS system we examined the query specification process used by humans. We found that incremental query specification, natural ways of expressing joins and an additional 'all'-operator are important to improve the query specification process making it considerably easier to use in comparison with query languages like SQL. The Graphical Database Interface described in this paper incorporates the mentioned capabilities as part of the MDBMS system. We think that the principles are of general use not only for multimedia systems but for any database query interface. |
