Data mining information visualisation - beyond charts and graphs

Data mining has become a major academic research area over the last ten years. However, in the transition from academic prototypes to commercial products there have been few successes with commercial data mining applications failing to make any significant impact in the marketplace. In this paper it is argued that most data mining applications concentrate on the model-building phase of the data mining process and rarely engage the user in other stages. The paper reviews the challenges of producing successful data mining applications and in particular the role of information visualisation. Visualisation in data mining tends to be used to present final results, rather than playing an important part throughout the entire process. We argue that an immersive environment may provide the user with a more suitable interface than is commonly offered. We present a virtual data mining environment which attempts to integrate a data mining application interface and information visualisation in a seamless manner, using the concept of ´liquid data´.