IMPLICATIONS OF A COGNITIVE MODEL OF DATABASE QUERY: COMPARISON OF A NATURAL LANGUAGE, FORMAL LANGUAGE AND DIRECT MANIPULATION INTERFACE

We have developed an cognitive model of query writing, shown in Figure 1, which consists of three distinct stages. In stage one, Query Formulation, users attempt to satisfy goals by drawing on what information they may have about the stored data to generate a natural language request. In stage two, Query Translation, users must use pragmatic information about the database, including information about the system's model of the database (i.e. objects and available actions on those objects), to translate their natural language request into a request that satisfy the pragmatics of the intended query. In the third stage, Query Writing, users need information about the syntactic and semantic rules of the particular query language interface to produce a query that will be acceptable to the system.