Date: Tue, 05 Nov 1996 20:58:29 GMT Server: NCSA/1.5 Content-type: text/html Last-modified: Thu, 28 Sep 1995 17:30:31 GMT Content-length: 1931
The NEXT! project has three main components. First, there is a visual data exploration tool called DEVise that supports a paradigm called *visual queries*. Each visual query is in essence an abstract description of how a collection of sequence data is to be mapped to the user's screen. The query serves as a template that can be applied to any data set with the appropriate schema, and the visual presentation can subsequently be explored in detail by standard operations such as scrolling, zooming and probing.
The second component of NEXT! is a system called SEQ that supports SQL-style queries over sequence data. SEQ is distinguished from standard SQL in that it provides easy (and efficient) ways to pose queries that use the sequentiality in the data set, for example, ``Find the N-day moving average of IBM''. SEQ can be used in conjunction with DeVise, with DeVise serving as a visual browser and SEQ as a data manipulation backend.
The third component of NEXT! is an on-going effort to investigate novel ways of analysing large data sets (often called *data mining*). In particular, we have developed a tool called BIRCH that can effectively cluster very large data sets.