DOODLE: A Visual Language For Object-oriented Databases

Abstract

In this paper we introduce DOODLE, a new visual and declarative language for object-oriented databases. The main principle behind the language is that it is possible to <i>display and query the database with arbitrary pictures</i>. We allow the user to tailor the display of the data to suit the application at hand or her preferences. We want the user-defined visualizations to be stored in the database, and the language to express all kinds of visual manipulations. For extendibility reasons, the language is object-oriented. The semantics of the language is given by a well-known deductive query language for object-oriented databases. We hope that the formal basis of our language will contribute to the theoretical study of database visualizations and visual query languages, a subject that we believe is of great interest, but largely left unexplored.