A FRAMEWORK FOR KNOWLEDGE-BASED,INTERACTIVE DATA EXPLORATIONJade Goldstein, Steven F. Roth, John Kolojejchick, and Joe MattisSchool of Computer ScienceCarnegie Mellon UniversityPittsburgh, PA 15213(412) 268-8818Jade.Goldstein@cs.cmu.edu, Steven.Roth@cs.cmu.eduABSTRACTIn this paper, we propose a framework that combines the functionality of data exploration and automatic presentation systems to create a knowledge-based, interactive, data exploration system. The purpose of a data exploration system is to enable users to uncover and extract relationships hidden in large data sets. The purpose of an automatic presentation system is to reduce the need for users and application developers to have graphic design expertise and to spend much time interacting with graphics packages to view their data. Previous work on data exploration was limited to query mechanisms that were often complex to learn and difficult to use, data manipulation mechanisms that did not provide complete coverage of the operations needed by users (especially the ability to form ad hoc groupings of data), and graphics that were restricted to a small set of predefined visualizations. Automatic presentation research, although addressing these issues, has been limited to the display of small data sets. This research has also not developed approaches to combine interactive, user-directed processes of design and data manipulation with automatic presentation mechanisms. We propose a framework that overcomes these limitations of current data exploration systems and integrates new interactive capabilities with automatic presentation components. This approach to supporting data exploration integrates recent work on SageTools, an environment for interactive and automatic presentation design, with a prototypical interactive data manipulation system called IDES. In this paper, we present our work on the IDES data manipulation capabilities and discuss requirements for coordinating them with automatic presentation of large data sets.KEYWORDS: Data Exploration, Data Visualization, Intelligent Interfaces, Automatic Presentation Systems, Graphic Design, Computer-supported Design, Large Data Sets.1. INTRODUCTION

A Framework for Knowledge-based Interactive Data Exploration