BROWSING LARGE ONLINE DATA WITH QUERY PREVIEWS
Egemen Tanin, Catherine Plaisant, Ben Shneiderman · 2007
Companies, government agencies, and other types of organizations are making their large data available to the world over the Internet. Current front-ends rarely give users information about the contents of the data. This leads many users to waste time and network resources posing queries that have either zero-hit or mega-hit result sets. Query previews form a novel visual approach for browsing large data collections. Query previews supply data distribution information to the users and give continuous feedback about the size of the result set as the query is being formed. On the other hand, initial designs of query previews used only a few pre-selected attributes. The distribution information was displayed only on these attributes. Unfortunately, many data sets are formed of numerous tables and attributes. This paper introduces a generalization of query previews. We allow users to visually browse multiple tables and attributes from a data set using a hierarchical browser. Any of the attributes can be used to display the distribution information, making query previews applicable to many public online data sets.