DATA REFINERY: A DIRECT MANIPULATION USER INTERFACE FOR DATA QUERYING WITH INTEGRATED QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE GRAPHICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF QUERY CONSTRUCTION AND QUERY RESULT PRESENTATION

A system, method, and user interface for a software product provides for an integrated user interface with both query construction and query result presentation graphically represented to the user in a common graphical space. The user can construct a query using graphical representations of refine operations, including filter and tag operations. The refine operation is executed upon a number of input records from a database. The refine operation selects or identifies a number of records that satisfy the user defined criteria of the operation. Graphical representations of input and output data for each operation are displayed, and sized so that the graphical size of the output representation relative to the graphical size of the input representation is approximately equal to the ratio of the number of output records to the number of input records. Multiple refine operations may be defined, so that the graphical representation of the output of one operation becomes the input of a subsequent operation. In this manner, there is provided a common visual metaphor for both query construction and query result presentation, enabling the user to both qualitatively and quantitatively assess query results in the context of the overall database data.