[2308.10319] A Tutorial on Visual Representations of Relational Queries
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Computer Science > Databases

arXiv:2308.10319 (cs)
[Submitted on 20 Aug 2023]

Title:A Tutorial on Visual Representations of Relational Queries

Authors:Wolfgang Gatterbauer
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Abstract: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 key visual 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).
Comments: 4 page tutorial paper at VLDB 2023, tutorial web page with slides to be posted in time: this https URL. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2208.01613
Subjects: Databases (cs.DB); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC); Logic in Computer Science (cs.LO); Programming Languages (cs.PL)
Cite as: arXiv:2308.10319 [cs.DB]
  (or arXiv:2308.10319v1 [cs.DB] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2308.10319
Related DOI: https://doi.org/10.14778/3611540.3611578

Submission history

From: Wolfgang Gatterbauer [view email]
[v1] Sun, 20 Aug 2023 16:58:48 UTC (120 KB)
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