OHQL - A HYPERTEXT APPROACH FOR MANIPULATING OBJECT-ORIENTED DATABASES

The object-oriented database management systems (OODBMS) provide powerful end-user interfaces. The manipulation at the object level is graphical and navigational, whereas the manipulation at the class level is based on a query language close to SQL. This way of interrogating classes is an impediment for users who are not specialized in computer science as SQL is in the relational database management systems (RDBMS). In this article, we describe an interface for an OODBMS. This interface, called OHQL (Object Hypertext Query Language), implements some concepts from the Hypertext Systems and is intended for nonspecialist users (managers, decision-makers, . . .). The latter visualize the scheme of the object-oriented database (OODB) in the shape of a hypergraph. They express queries graphically from the nodes and the links of the hypergraph. They handle the complex and multimedia objects and the classes of the OODB in an unified way.