Visualisation and Exploration of Scientific Data Using Graphs.

We present a prototype application for graph-based exploration and mining of online databases, with particular emphasis on scientific data. The application builds structured graphs that allow the user to explore patterns in a data set, including clusters, trends, outliers, and relationships. A number of different graphs can be rapidly generated, giving complementary insights into a given data set. The application has a Flash-based graphical interface and uses semantic information from the data sources to keep this interface as intuitive as possible. Data can be accessed from local and remote databases and files. Graphs can be explored using an interactive visual browser, or graph-analytic algorithms. We demonstrate the approach using marine sediment data, and show that differences in benthic species compositions in two Antarctic bays are related to heavy metal contamination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]