Tech Report HCIL-98-17

Plaisant, C., Venkatraman, M., Ngamkajornwiwat, K., Barth, R., Harberts, B., Feng, W.
Refining query previews techniques for data with multivalued attributes: The case of NASA EOSDIS
IEEE Forum on Research and Technology Advances in Digital Libraries (ADL '99), IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, 50-59
HCIL-98-17, CS-TR-4010, UMIACS-TR-99-20

Query Previews allows users to rapidly gain an understanding of the content and scope of a digital collection. It uses overviews and previews of abstracted metadata that allows users to perform rapid and dynamic elimination of undesired data. In this paper we present an update on our work developing query previews for a variety of NASA EOSDIS situations. We focused on approaches that successfully address the challenge of multi-valued attribute data while remaining independent of the number of records. We proposed two techniques and showed examples of their use with NASA data.