Visual Browsing of Remote and Distributed Data

Abstract

Data repositories around the world hold many thousands of data sets. Finding information from these data sets is greatly facilitated by being able to quickly and efficiently browse remote data sets. In this note, we introduce the Iconic Remote Visual Data Exploration tool(IRVDX), which is a visual data mining tool used for exploring the features of remote and distributed data without the necessity of downloading the entire data set. IRVDX employs three kinds of visualizations: one provides a reduced representation of the data sets, which we call Dataset Icons. These icons show the important statistical characteristics of data sets and help to identify relevant data sets from distributed repositories. Another one is called the Remote Dataset Visual Browser that provides visualizations to browse remote data without downloading the complete data set to identify its content. The final one provides visualizations to show the degree of similarity between two data sets and to visually determine whether a join of two remote data sets will be meaningful.