Abstract
One of the main developments in the database area concerns tools that provide a non expert user with a simple understanding of the database content, and a friendly extraction of information from the database. Moreover, the user often needs data at different aggregation levels, as a result of continuing operations or for statistical analysis. This interaction is usual in scientific and socio- economic applications, but also exists in any business enterprise performing data analysis, market projections or inventory trends. The paper describes a system that allows querying uniformly both elementary and aggregate data, using diagrams as standard user interface. The system, called GRASP (GRAphical Statistical Package), makes use of two conceptual data models, a query language on these models and a graphical user interface. The conceptual models are the Entity-Relationship Model and the Conceptual Statistical Model; the query language supports visual interaction. Such a language allows to query elementary and aggregate data; it is, therefore, suitable for several different purposes: a) expressing queries on elementary data; b) building aggregate data from elementary data; c) computing new aggregate data using statistical operators. The main characteristic of the interface is the availability of a rich set of primitives for the selection of the schema of interest and for the query formulation. Furthermore, a top-down schema library is available, which supports the user in the analysis of the schema at different abstraction levels.
Work supported by Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT) and Progetto Finalizzato Sistemi Informatici e Calcolo Parallelo, National Research Council (CNR) Italy.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
A.V.Aho, J.D.Ullman — University of Data Retrieval Language — pp. 110–120 in Proc. of the 6th ACM SIGACT-SIPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, 1979.
M.Angelaccio, T.Catarci, G.Santucci—QBD*: A Graphical Query Language with Recursion — Technical Report N.31.88 of the Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Universita' di Roma "La Sapienza", dicembre 1988. To appear in Proc. of the 3rd Human-Computer Interaction Conference, Boston, 1989.
M.Angelaccio, T.Catarci, G.Santucci—QBD*: A Fully Visual System for E-R Oriented Database — submitted to the VL Conference 89, Rome 1989.
P.Atzeni, P.P.Chen — Completeness of Query Languages for the Entity Relationship Model — in P.P. Chen (ed.) Proc. of the 2nd Intl. Conference on the Entity Relationship Approach to Information Modelling and Analysis, Washington D.C., North Holland, 1981.
G.Barcaroli, G.Di Battista, E.Fortunato, C.Leporelli — Design of Statistical Information Media: Time Performance and Storage Constraints — in Proc. of the 4th Statistical and Scientific Database Management, Rome, June 1988.
C.Batini, G.Di Battista — Design of Statistical Databases: a Methodology for the Conceptual Step — in Information Systems, Vol.13, 4, 1988.
D.M.Campbell, D.W.Embley, B.Czejdo — A relationally complete query language for an entity-relationship model — pp 90–97 in Proc. of the 4th International Conference on Entity-Relationship Approach, Chicago, 1985.
T.Catarci, G.Santucci — GRASP: a complete graphical conceptual language for definition and manipulation of statistical databases — in Proc. of the 8th Symposium on Computational Statistics, COMPSTAT, Copenhagen, 1988.
P.Chan, A.Shoshani — SUBJECT: A directory driven system for organizing and accessing large statistical databases — in Proc. of the VLDB Conference, 1980.
A.K.Chandra, D.Harel — Computable Queries of Relational Databases — pp. 99–128 in Journal of Computer Sciences, N.25, 1, August 1982.
P.P.Chen — The Entity-Relationship Model toward a Unified View of Data — in ACM Transactions on Data Base Systems, 1976.
E.F. Codd — A Relational Model for Large Shared Data Banks — pp. 337–387 in Communication of the ACM, Vol. 13, 6, 1970.
E.F. Codd — Relational completeness of database sub-languages — pp. 65–98 in R. Rustin (ed.) Data Base Systems, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1972.
B.Czejdo, D.W.Embley — An approach to computation specification for an entity-relationship query language — in S.March (ed.) Proc. of the 6th International Conference on Entity-Relationship Approach, New York, 1987, pp. 307–322, 1987.
G.Di Battista — Automatic Drawing of Statistical Diagrams — in Proc. of the 4th Statistical and Scientific Database Management, Rome, June 1988.
A.Di Leva, P.Giolito — A Two Level Data Model for distributed statistical databases — pp. 19–54 in F.Ricci, L.Meoevoli (ed.) Proc. of the Conference on Statistical Databases, Roma, 1987.
R.Elmasri, J.A.Larson — A Graphical Query Facility for ER Databases — pp. 236–245 in Proc. of the 4th International Conference on Entity-Relationship Approach, Chicago, Illinois, 1985.
R.Elmasri, G.Wiederhold — GORDAS: a formal high-level query language for the entity-relationship model — pp. 49–72 in Proc. of the 2nd International Conference on Entity-Relationship Approach, Washington, D.C., 1981.
S.K.Gadia, J.H.Vaishnav — A query language for a homogeneous temporal database — in Proc. of the ACM PODS Conference, 1985.
M. Jarke, Y. Vassiliou — A Framework for Choosing a Database Query Language — pp. 313–340 in ACM Computing Surveys, Vol.17, 3, 1985.
V.M.Markowitz — ERROL: an entity-relationship role oriented query language — in Proc. of the 3rd Conference on Entity-Relationship Approach, 1983.
H.M.Markowitz, A.Malhotra, D.P.Pazel — The ER and EAS Formalism for System Modeling, and the EAS-E Language — pp. 29–47 in P.P. Chen (ed.) Entity Relationship Approach to Information Modeling and Analysis, ER Institute, 1981.
G. Ozsoyoglu, Z. Meral Ozsoyoglu — Statistical Database Query Languages — pp. 1071–1081 in IEEE Transaction on Software Engineering, Vol. SE-II, No. 10, October 1985.
T.R.Rogers, R.G.G.Cattell — Entity-Relationship Database User Interfaces — pp. 323–336 in S.March (ed.) Proc. of the 6th International Conference on Entity-Relationship Approach, New York 1987.
C.S. dos Santos, E.J.Neuhold, A.L.Furtado — A Data Type Approach to the Entity Relationship Model — pp. 114–130 in Proc. of the International Conference on the Entity-Relationship Approach to Systems Analysis and Design, 1979.
A. Shoshani — STATISTICAL DATABASES: CHARACTERISTICS, PROBLEMS AND SOME SOLUTIONS — in Proc. of the 8th VLDB, 1982.
K.Subieta, M.Missala — Semantics of query languages for the entity relationship model — in S.March (ed.) Proc. of the 6th International Conference on Entity-Relationship Approach, New York 1987.
R. Tamassia, G. Di Battista, C. Batini — Automatic Graph Drawing and Readability of Diagrams — IEEE Transactions on Systems, Men and Cybernetics, 1988.
H.Y.Wang, U.Dayal — Using the Entity Relationship Model for Implementing Multi-Model Database Systems — pp. 237–258 in P.P. Chen (ed.) Entity Relationship Approach to Information Modeling and Analysis, ER Institute, 1981.
H.K.T.Wong, I.Kuo — GUIDE: Graphical User Interface for Database Exploration — pp. 22–31 in Proc. of the 8th VLDB Conference, Mexico City, 1982.
Z.Q.Zhang, A.O.Mendelzon — A Graphical Query Language for Entity-Relationship Databases — in Proc. of 3rd International Conference on Entity-Relationship Approach, 1983.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1990 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Catarci, T., Santucci, G. (1990). GRASP: A graphical system for statistical databases. In: Michalewicz, Z. (eds) Statistical and Scientific Database Management. SSDBM 1990. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 420. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-52342-1_26
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-52342-1_26
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-52342-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-46968-1
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive