Database Exploration for Microbial Information

Several countries on different continents have collections of microbial cultures; these collections have a lot of information, because a single microorganism can collect a great amount of information in several researches. Regularly, microbiology researchers want to explore databases to find new knowledge, relationships, similarities, etc. However, information systems with traditional HTML forms offer poor access to data and limited interaction. Therefore, new computer tools that allow interactive database exploration for this type of information are necessary. This paper presents a new approach to interaction in database exploration. This proposal uses a semantic representation to obtain a quick, efficient and intuitive way to access information. Our proposal is to transform the semantics contained in a conceptual scheme of a database in a structure composed by visual elements with meaning in the interface. This new way of interaction offers a field of research that can allow the creation of generic architectures for database exploration for use in various types of scientific databases.