Kaleidoquery-A Flow-based Visual Language and its Evaluation

This paper describes the Kaleidoquery visual query language for object databases and its comparative evaluation with OQL. The design philosophy behind the filter flow nature of Kaleidoquery and each of the language’s constructs is described, and examples are given that allow comparisons to be made with OQL. This is followed by a description of an experiment with the Kaleidoquery and OQL languages. Two groups of subjects, programmers and non-programmers, were taught aspects of OQL and Kaleidoquery, and then tested under experimental conditions. Results show that both groups answered significantly more correct queries using certain constructs of the Kaleidoquery language.