Patent US 5,283,894

A user interface for a database management system uses an interactive display to display information selected from the database in magnitude ordered rows comprising a set of items. Each row is an assertion consisting of a plurality of components including an entity, an attribute and a value of the attribute. The components are arranged in that fixed order in decreasing significance, respectively. In the database management system, the database is itself also stored in this format. A database engine in the database management system utilizes a B-tree index to the database and a meta accessing method for items from the database in a working cache.