Fast cartography for data explorers

Abstract

Exploration is the act of investigating unknown regions. An analyst exploring a database cannot, by definition, compose the right query or use the appropriate data mining algorithm. However, current data management tools cannot operate without well defined instructions. Therefore, browsing an unknown database can be a very tedious process. Our project, Atlas, is an attempt to circumvent this problem. Atlas is an active DBMS front-end, designed for database exploration. It generates and ranks several data maps from a user query. A data map is a small set of database queries (less than a dozen), in which each query describes an interesting region of the database. The user can pick one and submit it for further exploration. In order to support interaction, the system should operate in quasi-real time, possibly at the cost of precision, and require as little input parameters as possible. We draft a framework to generate such data maps, and introduce several short-to long-terms research problems.