Fast Cartography for Data Explorers

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 shortto long-terms research problems. 1. ANSWERING QUERIES WITH QUERIES In business as well as in science, the volume and complexity of the data to be handled has been rapidly expanding. This has led to a massive research effort, in at least two directions. On one hand, database scientists have been focussing on the storage and retrieval of this data. This led to scalable, robust, and now well established data management systems. On the other hand, data miners have been trying to make sense of this data by exploiting statistical regularities. In both directions, many of the research challenges set several decades ago have been successfully tackled. It is now possible to detect dubious credit card transactions among Terabytes of transactions, or detect interesting target populations for marketing with acceptable latency and precision. Indeed, coupling massive data repositories and smart data mining algorithms allows solving many of the data analyst’s problems. That is, when the problem is clearly defined. However, what if a user wants to explore the DBMS X Atlas