This talk will present the key features of Visionary, a presentation system for ODBC and JDBC data sources. Visionary shows the result of a query on an arbitrary-sized canvas. The end user controls a viewer, which is a certain elevation above the canvas, and which can be freely panned in all directions. Semantic zooming is also supported; hence, at high elevation, an employee could be viewed as a dot on a geographic map; at lower elevation, he could morph into a picture and then into a historical graph of his salary versus time.

Even more powerful is the Visionary notion of wormholes. Canvases can have holes in them, through which other canvases (behind the current one) are visible. The viewer is merely a greater distance above the partially hidden canvas than the one in front of it. This talk will show several Visionary demo applications and present Visionary Studio, the drag-and-drop, wizard-oriented development environment. In addition, the talk will present several unsolved research problems in this style of interface that merit investigation.

Visionary was originally written as the Tioga/DataSplash system at Berkeley in the mid 1990's. After commercialization by Illustra, two rewrites by Informix, and a brief ownership by IBM, it is now being enhanced and marketed by Rocket Software.

This talk is cosponsored by the IEEE Computer Society.