The SIEUFERD Project

SIEUFERD is a general-purpose user interface for relational databases. It takes its inspiration from two decades' worth of graphical database applications that were developed, at great expense, to serve niche markets such as seafood trading, music school administration, and refugee camp management, and attempts to generalize their standard UI idioms into a single, universal application that provides most of their features in a schema-independent manner. The proof that this can be done lies in existing general-purpose "killer apps" such as Excel and Tableau; the challenge lies in achieving the same for the generalized relational database use case (think CRUD over data modeled by entity-relationship diagrams).

MIT News article: Democratizing databases (July 8, 2016)

This research is now being commercialized at Ultorg.

Publications

Expressive Query Construction through Direct Manipulation of Nested Relational Results (7.4MB, PDF file)
Eirik Bakke and David R. Karger.
SIGMOD 2016: ACM International Conference on Management of Data.

Automatic Layout of Structured Hierarchical Reports (728KB, PDF file)
Eirik Bakke, David R. Karger, and Robert C. Miller.
InfoVis 2013/IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

A Spreadsheet-Based User Interface for Managing Plural Relationships in Structured Data (1.4MB, PDF file)
Eirik Bakke, David R. Karger, and Robert C. Miller.
CHI 2011: SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

The Schema-Independent Database UI: A Proposed Holy Grail and Some Suggestions (683KB, PDF file)
Eirik Bakke and Edward Benson.
CIDR 2011: Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research.

Source Archive

BibTeX

Screenshots