Candidate Talk: Graphical User Interfaces as Updatable Views

Guava (GUI-as-view) is a project that was started to address the needs of domain experts who want to run queries. Not all domain experts have extensive database experience. Consequently, it is difficult for such a user to write a query, and the resulting query may not produce the result the user expects.
Guava can be broken into two parts. The first is a method to take a user interface and construct a query interface from it, thereby leveraging the potentially large amount of effort put into making the UI accessible to domain experts. The second is a channel, an artifact that describes a relationship between two database schemas as a sequence of encapsulated operators. A channel can accept queries, data updates, and schema modifications against one schema and translate them into equivalent ones against the other schema. A channel is similar to an updatable view but with greatly different expressive power. This talk introduces both components, describes how they interact, and offers insights into new directions and applications of channels.