Database Challenges for Exploratory Computing

Data Service API Design for Data Analytics

“…legacy systems, scientific data repositories, and social networks) can be conveyed and integrated into a structured, well-interpretable multidimensional data model in data warehouse by using batch processing techniques like Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) [23], which is a process in data warehousing responsible for pulling data out of the source systems, transforming, and placing it into a data warehouse. It is demanding and challenging to provide an interface that supports OLAP operations to explore the multidimensional data for analytics purpose [15]. An approach is proposed in [3] to recommend individual or user group OLAP preferences by mining query logs .…”

Exploratory computing: a comprehensive approach to data sensemaking

“…Let us start with a definition: "Faceted search, also called faceted navigation or faceted browsing, is a technique for accessing information organized according to a faceted classification system, allowing users to explore a collection of information by applying multiple filters […] A faceted classification system classifies each information element along multiple explicit dimensions, called facets [22], enabling the classifications to be accessed and ordered in multiple ways rather than in a single, pre-determined, taxonomic order". 3 To be more precise, we can define faceted search as faceted navigation enhanced by the use of retrieval systems making use of keywords. It was put forth for querying documents [23], databases [24] and semantic data [25,26], giving vent to the so-called semantic faceted search.…”

“…For this reason, the exploration of big (and possibly rich 1 ) datasets has received much attention lately, in almost all domains of knowledge. This paper is about a comprehensive approach for making sense of data: Exploratory Computing, EC in what follows [1][2][3]. The EC approach has at its core the idea that non-expert users (i.e., non-data analysts) can be empowered to perform complex queries within a set of items to understand a phenomenon, answer research questions, and support a decision-taking process etc.…”

“…From the Big Data perspective, the problems posed by the EC vision are diverse and challenging [3]. Indeed, in the database research community, most methods for extracting significant and synthetic knowledge from data are tailored to be used by professional data scientists, who, besides having knowledge of the domain of interest, should also be proficient mathematicians, statisticians and computer engineers at the same time in order to use them effectively.…”

Interactive browsing and navigation in relational databases

“…Several database researchers argued that the usability of database querying systems can improve by adopting the direct manipulation paradigm [42], a well-established design principle in the HCI and information visualization areas. Acknowledging that users' needs are often ambiguous rather than precisely specifiable, researchers have developed many tools that enable users to interactively browse and explore databases [28,11,43]. Although they are not specifically designed for relational databases, a number of interactive visualization systems for entity-relationship data have been developed by information visualization researchers [32,22,21,36].…”