One of the more important aspects of reviewing a paper is to determine whether its style, language, level of abstraction, and structure are appropriate for the journal’s audience. This paper is right on target. It provides the right level of detail, abstraction, and theory for the ACM Transactions on Information Systems. It would not be appropriate for Datamation or ComputerWorld because it would not be understood by most people working in commercial data processing or databases.

The paper is very interesting, however. The notion of using a hypergraph as a representation of search strategies is intriguing. Several commercial possibilities (if you will pardon the expression) come to mind. This could be a reasonable analysis tool in building an executive information system or a text-based document retrieval system. The linkage to relational databases makes it not only intellectually interesting but implementable in a “real world” environment (please pardon the obvious oxymoron--unreal worlds are difficult to manage).

I would like to see copies of the promised follow-up research on the user interface. Watters and Shepherd may be on to something. I recommend this paper to the serious data person who is interested in alternative approaches to representing and thinking about data access.