i3: intelligent, interactive investigation of OLAP data cubes

Abstract

The goal of the i3(eye cube) project is to enhance multidimensional database products with a suite of advanced operators to automate data analysis tasks that are currently handled through manual exploration. Most OLAP products are rather simplistic and rely heavily on the user's intuition to manually drive the discovery process. Such ad hoc user-driven exploration gets tedious and error-prone as data dimensionality and size increases. We first investigated how and why analysts currently explore the data cube and then automated them using advanced operators that can be invoked interactively like existing simple operators. Our proposed suite of extensions appear in the form of a toolkit attached with a OLAP product. At this demo we will present three such operators: DIFF, RELAX and INFORM with illustrations from real-life datasets.