Hc. Chan et Rc. Goldstein, USER-DATABASE INTERACTION AT THE KNOWLEDGE LEVEL OF ABSTRACTION, Information and software technology, 39(10), 1997, pp. 657-668
Despite the widespread popularity of relational databases, it is still
very difficult for trained users to formulate relational queries. The
major cause of this difficulty is the fact that the user and the data
base system are forced to communicate using constructs that are not cl
osely related to the user's world. This paper proposes and develops a
new level of user-database interaction, the knowledge-level (KL) inter
face, where the user and the database system exchange only knowledge f
rom the user's world. The data structure used in the database is fully
hidden from the user. Under the new KL approach, the database system
is no longer seen as a store of data. Rather, it is an agent to hold d
omain knowledge and provide it upon request. It is shown that the KL i
nterface is in many ways better than the relational interface. Users o
f the KL interface need to know less and perform fewer data manipulati
on operations than users of the relational interface. (C) 1997 Elsevie
r Science B.V.