An Interface for Web Based Access to Dynamic Contents

Abstract

Many research efforts aim to provide access to database contents through the medium of the web. At the human end, many web users have little or no database query language skills. Most users are highly skilled at referring to tabular data, as in an Airline time plan. Natural inclination exists among the users for object-by-object traction to find information. For example, for browsing through a book/handbook – users tend to locate objects and path, by following an item-wise (step-by-step) link approach. We propose such an approach based on object based traction (calculations). It is termed as Object-by-Object Calculate (OBOC) approach. Many web users tend to reject the available SQL type or form based black-box approaches.

Our aim is to equip the user with object level query language tools. These facilitate queries and forming queries an easy task at the human end ( for unskilled users as well as programmers). The proposed interface introduces simplicity and avoids communication ambiguities. It provides a human-level interface between the user and query languages, such as the SQL. As an intermediate level, the OBOC approach, proposes to support simple Object-to-Object operations with closure property. We compare the proposed approach with the traditional query interfaces such as SQL or QBE. It is an efficient alternative as a high level language interface for web users.