Abstract Information Model for presenting database query results

The exponential growth in the number of web documents and the technological advancements in communication systems over the Internet has resulted in tremendous increase in users accessing those documents for their needs. They may search for documents or for data available in the web. In the former situation, the documents are ranked using different techniques to list the relevant documents in the beginning from the huge amount of documents retrieved that contain more irrelevant documents. But in the later case, all the data retrieved are not just relevant to the query but they are all the correct answers to the given query. And there are situations where we cannot order the retrieved tuples using the regular sorting technique. Normally a database query will fetch more tuples and it is not possible to display the whole query result set in one single screen. Even though the users are interested in only few tuples, we cannot reduce the result set unless the query is too selective and user preferences are known. This paper proposes an Abstract Information Model to display only the abstract information of the result set in a single screen instead of showing the actual tuples. And also the users can refine their search so that they can find the required result set in minimum number of steps.