User-Defined Visual Languages for Querying Data
Isabel F. Cruz · 1993
doodle is the first language to be proposed for querying object-oriented databases with user-defined visual languages. A doodle program defines a visual language in a by example fashion. In this paper we continue the preliminary expos'e on doodle (SIGMOD'92). We refine the language, and provide complex examples that illustrate the extensive capabilities of doodle in a variety of applications. The contributions of doodle to other areas of Computer Science, such as constraint languages and graph drawing are also outlined. doodle explores the limits of declarative languages by making data and its manipulation visual, while staying within the bounds of the formal database field. The formal basis of doodle motivates the study of visual expressiveness and points to further research. 1 Introduction It has a been a long-standing claim that pictures convey information in ways that text and tables cannot, as illustrated by the books of Tufte [Tuf83, Tuf90] and Bertin [Ber83]. In this paper a p...