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The middle manager, medical practitioner, scientist and others are vocationally dependent upon information and can be considered as data users. These data users under circumstances which preclude the use of computers would be required to develop or instigate their own 'system" for storing and retrieving information, probably utilising a card index, filing cabinets, etc. Today a computer database can efficiently replace the card index and filing cabinet. It might therefore be desirable for a facility to be made available which could provide these data users with the ability to develop their own computer database 'systems". Most data users cannot be expected to be familiar with the concepts involved in computer database design, but they can be expected to be familiar with the data they use in their professional capacity. Currently described database design expert systems (Bouzeghoub et al., 1985; Rouff, 1984) do not exhibit user friendly interfaces: this chapter attempts to describe such an interface, and will refer to the data user identified earlier as a naive database designer, that is someone with expert knowledge of the data they wish to hold on computer database, but who has little or no knowledge of data-base design concepts or techniques.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4613-0845-4_16

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