In many of nowadays web-based environments for electronic marketing and commerce, that present large multimedia product and service catalogues, it becomes more and more difficult to provide naive end users, such as private consumers or commercial business partners, with intuitive user interfaces to access the large multimedia collections describing the presented products and services. The same holds for marketing managers and other employees responsible for managing and maintaining the large and constantly changing set of multimedia information chunks and fragments contained in these collections. As a consequence, many efforts are devoted to improve the quality of the interaction between users and databases. Virtual Reality (VR) techniques are a promising interaction paradigm particularly suited to novice and/or occasional users. The users are facilitated in the database navigation since the system proposes them an environment that reproduces a real situation and gives the possibilityof interacting by manipulating objects that have a direct correspondence with known objects.

Zusammenfassung
This volume presents modern visual interfaces and database systems and covers the following topics in detail: next generation interfaces, visual representations, three-dimensional interfaces, modelling of visual information, image understanding and processing and video databases.

Inhalt
1 Invited Talk.- 1 Selected ingredients in end-user programming.- 2 Session: Models and Metaphors.- 2 Exploiting model-based techniques for user interfaces to databases.- 3 Building metaphors for supporting user interaction with multimedia databases.- 3 Session: Database Interfaces.- 4 What you see is what you store: database-driven interfaces.- 5 Kaleidoscape: a 3D environment for querying ODMG compliant databases.- 4 Session: Spatial Databases.- 6 A visual database system for spatial and non-spatial data management.- 7 Visualizing and animating R-trees and spatial operations in spatial databases on the worldwide web.- 5 Panel.- 8 Is video a useful means of sharing information?.- 6 Demonstrations.- 9 The VASCO R-tree JAVA applet.- 10 Metaphors for supporting user interaction with multimedia databases a demonstration.- 11 Image information system (I.I.S): a visual database system for spatial and non-spatial data management.- 12 A working generic canonical schematic UIMS for an ODBMS.- 13 ESCHER's complex objects: a demonstration of simplicity.- 14 Direct manipulation spatial exploration using SVIQUEL.- 15 VisualMOQL: a visual query language for image databases.- 16 Image matching using the OBIR system with feature point histograms.- 7 Posters.- 17 Textural features and relevance feedback for image retrieval.- 18 A content-based video retrieval method using a visualized sound pattern.- 19 Virtual cell: a general framework for simulating and visualizing cellular physiology.- 8 Invited Talk.- 20 Crossing the divide between computer vision and databases in search of image databases.- 9 Session: Image Queries.- 21 Multiscale similarity matching for subimage queries of arbitrary size.- 22 Effective image retrieval supporting complex similarity queries.- 23 Weighting spatial relationships in retrieval by visual contents.- 10 Session: Modeling and Usability.- 24 Visual modeling of temporal data in usability experiments.- 25 Human Modelling and design of spatio-temporal queries on 3D video database.- 11 Session: Complex Visual Management.- 26 Visualizing complex schemas in description logic using movable lens filters.- 27 A method for shot boundary detection and R-frame selection of digital video.- Index of contributors.- Keyword index.