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Title: A Tutorial on Visual Representations of Relational Queries
Query formulation is increasingly performed by systems that need to guess a user's intent (e.g. via spoken word interfaces). But how can a user know that the computational agent is returning answers to the right query? More generally, given that relational queries can become pretty complicated,how can we help users understand existing relational queries, whether human-generated or automatically generated? Now seems the right moment to revisit a topic that predates the birth of the relational model: developing visual metaphors that help users understand relational queries. This lecture-style tutorial surveys the keyvisual metaphors developed for visual representations of relational expressions.We will survey the history and state-of-the art of relationally-complete diagrammatic representations of relational queries, discuss the key visual metaphors developed in over a century of investigating diagrammatic languages, and organize the landscape by mapping their used visual alphabets to the syntax and semantics of Relational Algebra (RA) and Relational Calculus (RC).  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1956096
PAR ID:
10557928
Author(s) / Creator(s):
Publisher / Repository:
PVLDB
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment
Volume:
16
Issue:
12
ISSN:
2150-8097
Page Range / eLocation ID:
3890 to 3893
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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