Loch Prospector: Metadata Visualization for Lakes of Open Data (VIS 2020 Talk)
Channel: Northeastern University Data Visualization
Date: 09/04/2021

Loch Prospector is an interactive visualization designed to help data management researchers explore and understand the available data in data lakes.

For more info please see our website at https://lochprospector.github.io/ and our paper with all supplemental materials at https://osf.io/2s76d/

Related videos:
* VIS 2020 FFWD: https://youtu.be/rYab-wEjB0o
* VIS 2020 Talk: https://youtu.be/3nD2ppM2x70

Citation:
Neha Makhija, Mansi Jain, Nikolaos Tziavelis, Laura Di Rocco, Sara Di Bartolomeo, and Cody Dunne, "Loch Prospector: Metadata Visualization for Lakes of Open Data," in Proc. IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS '20), 2020. doi: 10.1109/VIS47514.2020.00032 preprint and materials doi: 10.31219/osf.io/2s76d

Abstract: Data lakes are an emerging storage paradigm that promotes data availability over integration. A prime example are repositories of Open Data which show great promise for transparent data science. Due to the lack of proper integration, Data Lakes may not have a common consistent schema and traditional data management techniques fall short with these repositories. Much recent research has tried to address the new challenges associated with these data lakes. Researchers in this area are mainly interested in the structural properties of the data for developing new algorithms, yet typical Open Data portals offer limited functionality in that respect and instead focus on data semantics.

We propose Loch Prospector, a visualization to assist data management researchers in exploring and understanding the most crucial structural aspects of Open Data — in particular, metadata attributes — and the associated task abstraction for their work. Our visualization enables researchers to navigate the contents of data lakes effectively and easily accomplish what were previously laborious tasks. A copy of this paper with all supplemental material is available at osf.io/2s76d/

Keywords: data management, data lake, design study, design study "lite" methodology, metadata, open data, visualization.