Report on the First International Workshop on Exploratory Search in Databases and the Web (ExploreDB 2014)

Databases are well-organized collections of data. Structured query languages, such as SQL, XQuery, and SPARQL, enable users to formulate precise queries over the data stored in a database. To be successful, users need to be familiar with the query language and the underlying data organization. Visual analytics naturally integrate the human in the data analysis process and enable her to apply her perceptual abilities to large data sets. Presenting data in an interactive, graphical form often fosters new insights and encourages the formation and validation of new hypotheses for better problem solving and gaining deeper domain knowledge. Visual analytics techniques have proven to be of high value both for the first steps of the data exploration process, namely understanding the data and generating hypotheses about the data, as well as for the actual knowledge discovery by guiding the search using visual feedback.