SIERRA: A Counterfactual Thinking-based Visual Interface for Property Graph Query Construction

Jiebing Ma, Sourav S. Bhowmick, Lester Tay, Byron Choi

Abstract: Attractive visual query interfaces (VQIs) have great potential to democratize the usage of property graph databases as they facilitate user-friendly query formulation without demanding the need to learn a property graph query language e.g.Cypher. Existing VQIs, however, do not embrace HCI principles and psychology theories to inform their design and as a result may limit their potential due to usability andaesthetics challenges. In this demonstration, we present a novelcounterfactual thinking -based (i.e. theory-informed) VQI called SIERRA for property graph query construction to address this limitation. It realizes a novel visual abstraction calledlabeled composite graph (LCG) and avisual shape definition language to create and maintain an LCG during query construction guided by theories and principles from HCI, visualization and psychology.