Interactive data analysis: the Control project

Data analysis is fundamentally an iterative process in which you issue a query, receive a response, formulate the next query based on the response, and repeat. You usually don't issue a single, perfectly chosen query and get the information you want from a database; indeed, the purpose of data analysis is to extract unknown information, and in most situations, there is no one perfect query. People naturally start by asking broad, big-picture questions and then continually refine their questions based on feedback and domain knowledge. In the Control (Continuous Output and Navigation Technology with Refinement Online) project at the University of California, Berkeley, the authors are working with collaborators at IBM, Informix, and elsewhere to explore ways to improve human-computer interaction during data analysis. The Control project's goal is to develop interactive, intuitive techniques for analyzing massive data sets.