Comprehending Boolean queries

ABSTRACT

Data selection is an integral part of information visualization. It almost universally incorporates Boolean logic in some way, despite the known difficulties of Boolean concepts for users. As a result many different visual interfaces have been proposed for specifying or displaying Boolean queries. In general they are tested experimentally, and though the results are usually promising, they normally show only that one interface is better or worse than another, but not why this is so.

This paper describes a new experimental methodology for evaluating query interfaces, which uses stimulus onset asynchrony to separate different aspects of query comprehension. We used it to evaluate a new visual query interface based on Karnaugh maps and discovered that there are two qualitatively different approaches to comprehension, deductive and inductive. The Karnaugh map representation scales extremely well with query complexity, and the experiments show that its good scaling properties occur because it strongly facilitates inductive comprehension.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT
      H.2.5 Heterogeneous Databases

Keywords:
boolean query, evaluation, stimulus onset asynchrony, visual query, visualization