Database challenges for exploratory computing

A model has been proposed to concretely perform exploration over a database. The model is general enough to encompass most data models and query languages that have been proposed for data management in the last few years. At the same time, it is precise enough to provide a first formalization of the problem and reason about the research challenges posed to database researchers by this new paradigm of interaction. The conversation is modeled as a lattice of nodes from the technical viewpoint. Each node is a view over the database described intentionally as a conjunctive query, and therefore represents a subset of database object. It is assumed that the user does not have clear goals, and therefore expects the system to suggest some promising starting points for the exploration. The user can browse the set making use of the facets and of their values and will inspect the set of items that satisfy the selection criteria.