INTERACTING WITH DATABASES IN THE GLOBAL INFORMATION INFRASTRUCTURE

The growth of the global Internet is causing a dramatic change in both the kind of people who access information and the types of informatio n itself. ranging from unstructured multimedia data to traditional rec ord-oriented data. To cope with these new needs, the interaction techn iques traditionally offered to DBMS users have to evolve and eventuall y integrate in a powerful interface to the global information infrastr ucture. In particular, from the user's point of view there is the need for both effective visualization of multimedia information and retrie val tools able to overcome the existing dichotomy between browsing and querying. This article concentrates on the mutual relationship betwee n database querying and Internet navigation by reviewing some importan t contributions from different areas, such as information retrieval, d atabase research, and visualization techniques.