Generating Sound from the Processing in Semantic Web Databases.

Databases process a lot of intermediate steps generating many intermediate results during data processing for
answering queries. It is not easy to understand these complex tasks and algorithms for students, developers and
all those interested in databases. For this purpose, an additional medium is sonification, which maps data to
auditory dimensions and offers a new audible experience to their listeners. Hence, we propose a sonification of query
processing paired with a corresponding visualization both integrated in a web application. In a demonstration of our
approach and in an extensive user evaluation we show that listeners increase their understanding of the operators’
functionality and sonification supports easy remembering of requirements like merge joins work on sorted input.
Furthermore, new ways of analyzing query processing are possible with our proposed sonification approach.