Graphical data displays and database queries: helping users select the right display for the task

This paper describes the process by which we have constructed an adaptive system for external representation (ER) selection support, designed to enhance users' ER reasoning performance. We describe how our user model has been constructed – it is a Bayesian network with values seeded from data derived from experimental studies. The studies examined the effects of users' background knowledge-of-external representations (KER) upon performance and their preferences for particular information display forms across a range of database query types.