6th Usenix Tcl/Tk Conference 98

Poster Paper

DataMynah: A pseudo-NL interface to large multivariate data sets

De Clarke

Lick Observatory

Santa Cruz, CA

Abstract of Poster Paper

This is the HTML version of the LaTeX doc that should appear in the Proceedings.

The user starts Mynah with a command like

./mynah -T Test.wrl English.rul 

The -T indicates that this Mynah session is running in Test mode, using the prototype rather than production tclX tlib file. The wrl file is a "world" of discourse file, establishing Mynah's basic knowledge (this info is derived from the RDBMS, but it takes a while to collect, so I cache it in this flat ascii file for quicker startup). The rul file is a series of brute-force substitution rules which Mynah will use to figure out user input, reducing it to a series of tokens it can understand.

Main Mynah Window (PS file)

The main Mynah window is based on Tom Poindexter's original Wisql design, and consists of a menu bar, a command area, and a results/output area. The user issues English-like commands to select and manipulate "datasets" from database tables. Mynah's responses (and sometimes displayed data) appear in the results window. Error results and "pay attention" messages appear in red. Other special text may appear in blue, or with pastel highlighting. Highlighted text can be clicked on by the user to get more information.

Actual commands can be found in these sample log files:

Documentary Session
Plot Command Examples
Actual Session Log

The "chart" commands you find in these log files result in a Time Series Plot Stack (PS file)

The user aqcuired a dataset, for

Zooming in on Stack (PS file)

One Plot in Detail (PS file)

Zooming on Detail (PS file)