ACM Computing Surveys 28A(4), December 1996, http://www.acm.org/surveys/1996/CatarciDatabases/ Copyright © 1996 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. See the permissions statement below.
Tiziana Catarci
Abstract: The already existing need of friendly environments for effective information access has been further enforced by the growth of the Internet, which is causing a dramatic change in both the kind of people who access the information (in a near future everybody will interact with computers in her/his everyday life) and the types of information itself (ranging from unstructured multimedia data to traditional record-oriented data). To cope with these new demands, the interaction techniques traditionally offered to DBMS users have to evolve and eventually integrate in a powerful interface to the global information infrastructure. The new interaction mechanisms must be especially friendly and easy-to-use, since, given the enormous quantity of information sources available on the Internet, most of the users remain permanent novices with respect to each one of the sources they have access to.Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.1.2 [Information Systems]: Human Factors; H.5 [Information Systems]: Information Interfaces and Presentation;
General Terms: Human Factors
Additional Key Words and Phrases: Database Query Languages, Information Navigation, Digital Libraries, Visual Languages, Information Retrieval
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