Graphical interaction with historical databases

Recent database applications are typically oriented towards a large set of non-expert users and therefore they need to be equipped with suitable interfaces facilitating the interaction with the system. It has been pointed out that temporal data constitute a growing part of such recent applications. However, there are not many proposals of systems providing the user with a friendly and effective environment to interact with temporal data. Our work concentrates on a user-oriented visual query system (called TVQE) for temporal databases. The system adopts a diagrammatic representation of the database schema and a “graphical notebook” as metaphor to allow the user to easily formulate conventional and temporal queries. The visual interaction mechanisms of TVQE are provided with precise syntax and semantics founded on formally defined graph based data model and minimal set of temporal graphical primitives