19th International CODATA Conference
Category: Data Visualization
VidaMine: User-Centred Development of a Visual Mining Environment
Stephen Kimani (kimani@dis.uniroma1.it),
Tremendous technological breakthroughs have virtually revolutionized the world.
One major consequence is that humans are confronted with ever-increasing already
massive amounts of data at virtually every turn. On the other hand, there have
not been corresponding advances in techniques for extracting knowledge from
the data. It therefore comes as no surprise that data still present formidable
challenges to effective and efficient mining of knowledge.
Since the human-visual system enables both recognition and understanding of overwhelming data at an instant [14], it is an outstanding resource for detecting and extracting knowledge from data. Tapping into the human-visual system would primarily entail exploiting relevant and effective visual strategies within the user interface. Most mining efforts have employed such visual strategies only at the beginning and at the end of the discovery process [13]. Human involvement in the entire mining process is crucial. Toward that, a human-user architectural component should be designed and positioned at a strategic place in an open overall discovery framework. Such an approach constitutes a great step toward according the user a central place in the entire discovery process since the aforementioned human user's outstanding visual system becomes much more available for exploitation across all the phases of the discovery process.
This research, which is part of the project D2I (Data to Information, http://www.dis.uniroma1.it/~lembo/D2I), focuses on the investigation and exploitation of strategies that are instrumental toward the realization of a visual interaction environment that supports the human user throughout the entire process of mining knowledge. Our research findings culminated in the realization of VidaMine (VIsual DAta MINing Environment) [1--12], a visual data mining system that exploits various visual strategies thereby offering a visual interface that allows or enables the user not only to process data, but also to steer, guide or direct the entire process of data mining.
Besides involving the user in the entire mining process, a visual mining system ought to involve the users in the user interface design process; which is not common in many visual mining endeavors. We adopted a real user-centered user interface design, equipped with usability studies. As reported in [3], we employed various usability methods progressively in the development lifecycle.
Moreover, unlike with many visual mining efforts and as reported in [4, 12], VidaMine is developed based on a careful definition of visual syntax and formal semantics. Among other benefits, such a definition facilitates data exchange and capturing semantics.
References:
1. S. Kimani, S. Lodi, T. Catarci, G. Santucci and C. Sartori: "VidaMine:A
Visual Data Mining Environment". Journal of Visual Languages
and Computing 15 (1):37-67, Elsevier, 2004.
2. S. Kimani, T. Catarci
and G. Santucci: "A Visual Data Mining Environment".
Visual Data Mining: Theory and Applications, S.J. Simoff, M. Noirhomme-Fraiture, M.H.
Böhlen Ed.s, LNAI series,
Springer-Verlag (to appear).
3. S. Kimani, T. Catarci
and G. Santucci: "Visual Data Mining: An Experience
with the Users". Proceedings of HCI International - Universal
Access in HCI: Inclusive Design in the Information Society, 2003.
4. S. Kimani,
5. S. Kimani: "An Effective Visual Data Mining
Environment". Doctoral Posters of the International Conference
on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), 2002.
6. S. Kimani, T. Catarci
and G. Santucci: "A Visual Data Mining
Environment: Metaqueries and Association Rules".
Proceedings of the International Conference in Advanced Visual
Interfaces (AVI), 2002.
7. F. Angiulli, T. Catarci,
P. Ciaccia, G. Ianni, S.
Kimani, S. Lodi, M. Patella, G. Santucci
and C. Sartori: "An Integrated Data Mining and
Data Presentation Tool". Proceedings of the International Conference on
Data Mining Methods anf Databases
for Engineering, Finance and Other Fields, 2002.
8. S. Kimani, T. Catarci
and G. Santucci: "A Visual Data Mining Environment".
Proceedings of the CODATA Workshop on Information Visualization
Presentation and Design, 2002.
9. S. Kimani, T. Catarci
and G. Santucci: "A Visual Data Mining Environment".
Proceedings of the ECML/PKDD Workshop on Visual Data Mining,
2002.
10. S. Kimani,
T. Catarci and G. Santucci: "Visual Data Mining. Il Sistema VidaMine". Proceedings of the D2I Workshop on Integration, Warehousing and Mining
of Data from Heterogeneous Sources, 2003.
11. T. Catarci, P. Ciaccia, V. Curci, S. Kimani, G. Ianni, S. Lodi, L. Palopoli, M.
Patella, G. Santucci and C. Sartori. "Visual Data Mining System Architecture". Technical Report D3.R2
of D2I, Integration, Warehousing, and Mining of Heterogeneous Data Sources,
Italian MIUR Project, http://www.dis.uniroma1.it/~lembo/D2I/, 2001.
12. S. Kimani, S. Lodi, T. Catarci, G.
Santucci and C. Sartori. "VidaMine: A Visual Data Mining
Environment". Technical Report, IEIIT-CNR,
13. U. Fayyad, G. G. Grinstein and A. Wierse. "Information Visualization in Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery".
Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2002.
14. S. K. Card, J. D. Mackinlay
and B. Shneiderman. "