Exploratory computing: a comprehensive approach to data sensemaking

The Big Data challenge has made the issue of“making sense” of data urgent and unavoidable. This paperintroduces exploratory computing (EC), a novel paradigmwhose aim is to support a comprehensive “exploratory”experience for the user. “Exploratory” because it supportssearch and discovery of information through various tasks(investigation, knowledge seeking, serendipitous discovery,comparison of information...) in a dynamic interaction,where meaningful feedbacks from the system play a cru-cial role, closely resembling a human-to-human dialogue.“Computing” because a complex interaction as the one out-lined above requires powerful computational strength for theuser to be able to fully profit from, and even enjoy, the interac-tion. EC is not associated with a predefined set of techniques:Rather, it is an approach that can be concretized in differentways. In the paper, two different implementations of the ECapproach are presented, both of which interpret the EC high-level requirements. It is the authors’ hope that others willfollow.