A visual interface for native XML database

XML is becoming a de facto standard for representing and exchanging data over the Web. With the tremendous growth of XML data on the Internet, an efficient database system becomes necessary to maintain it. Traditional databases that force all data to conform to an explicitly specified rigid schema are inefficient to maintain irregular XML data, thus, new data models, called native XML database management systems, are introduced. Currently proposed native database systems mainly focus on designing database architectures and their components, but they have not addressed how an efficient user interface can be designed to support users to interact with their databases. In this paper, we mainly present the design and implementation of DB manager, a visual interface for the native XML database management system, NextDB. DB manager is an integrated interface which is composed of various components that provide interactive communication between external users and internal database. It offers a rich variety of functions, and provides usability and accessibility to users. The results from an initial usability study show that the visual interface is usable and efficient for most users.