An Integrated Browsing and Querying System for Odmg-compliant Object Databases 1

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of an integrated object browsing and visual querying system called IVORY(Integrated Visual brOwsing and queRYing system) for object databases. The design goals of IVORY includes provision with a good user interface and compliance to standards. Provision with a good user interface is achieved through IVORY's integrated browsing and querying facilities, which are quite natural yet intuitive in accessing object databases. Compliance to standards is gained by IVORY queries being translated to OQL, the standard query language proposed by the Object Database Management Group(ODMG). IVORY provides nested window-based object visualization facility, and frame-based visual constructs. With IVORY, users can rst browse database objects, and then specify a query with visual manner. From those browsed objects, which are visualized as frames on the browser window, users can drag attributes to project or specify conditional predicate and drop them onto corresponding panes. In addition, user can specify content-based image comparison condition in the same way with another speciication method. At the moment, IVORY automatically generates internal graph structure which represents an IVORY query. IVORY translates the visual query into an equivalent OQL query statement, which is executed by OQL query processor; however, image comparison condition is separated by IVORY and content-based comparison algorithm is executed. Result objects of the OQL query and retrieved images are merged and displayed again in the browser window. IVORY system is implemented as a front-end to the SOP object database system.