Towards the Design of Expressive Data Exploration Environments

Information exploration processes are usually recognized by their inherent complexity, lack of knowledge and uncertainty, concerning both the domain and the solution strategies. Even though there has been much work on the development of computational systems supporting exploration tasks, the lack of a formal understanding of the exploration process and the absence of a proper separation of concerns approach in the design phase is the cause of many expressivity issues and serious limitations. This work shows how the design space for exploration environments can be structured by applying the separation of concerns approach, with special emphasis in characterizing the issues that must be addressed when designing the interface of such environments.