Database exploration: Problems and opportunities

The classical ways to access data, i.e. through a search engine or by querying a database, have today become insufficient when confronted with the new needs of data exploration and interpretation: at a user request, a search engine retrieves a very large collection of documents, while the query engine of a DBMS grants access to all the data that satisfy certain criteria. Once the documents or the data items have been received, the user can only start reading them and try to make sense of their contents, possibly relying on a ranking function that sorts the results in order of “relevance”. After all, this mechanism only works well when the intention of the search or query is to locate a specific information, such as the address of a restaurant or the salaries of all the employees with a certain position. Instead, ranked retrieval and querying are no longer adequate when the need of the user is being able to quickly examine interesting information, presented in a condensed yet illuminating way.