Generation of interactive visual environments for direct manipulation of database content

In this article we present the VIVID (Visual Interactive View Development) framework which support the rapid development of interactive views for direct manipulation of database objects through arbitrary combinations of diagrammatic and icon-based visual languages. A VIVID view visualizes a database configuration by filtering and transforming data to graphical objects in two-dimensional space. Objects are represented by arbitrary graphical symbols and their relationships are given as spatial relationships or connections between them. Visual tokens directly correspond to objects or object groups and their manipulation by, e.g., drag&drop, directly correspond to database operations like creation, deletion, or manipulation of attribute values. The interactive visual view is automatically generated from the definition of 1. symbols and their relation to data source, 2. their layout composition, and 3. their visual interaction.