Interacting with databases in the global information infrastructure

The growth of the global Internet is causing a dramatic change in both the kind of people who access information and the types of information itself, ranging from unstructured multimedia data to traditional record-oriented data. To cope with these new needs, the interaction techniques traditionally offered to DBMS users have to evolve and eventually integrate in a powerful interface to the global information infrastructure. In particular, from the user's point of view there is the need for both effective visualization of multimedia information and retrieval tools able to overcome the existing dichotomy between browsing and querying. This article concentrates on the mutual relationship between database querying and Internet navigation by reviewing some important contributions from different areas, such as information retrieval, database research, and visualization techniques.