Designing Views in HypothesisCreator: System for Assisting in Discovery

We discuss the significance of designing views on data in a computational system assisting scientists in the process of discovery. A view on data is considered as a particular way to interpret the data. In the scientific literature, devising a new view capturing the essence of data is a key to discovery. A system HypothesisCreator, which we have been developing to assist scientists in the process of discovery, supports users’ designing views on data and have the function of searching for good views on the data. In this paper we report a series of computational experiments on scientific data with HypothesisCreator and analyses of the produced hypotheses, some of which select several views good for explaining given data, searched and selected from over ten millions of designed views. Through these experiments we have convinced that view is one of the important factors in discovery process, and that discovery systems should have an ability of designing and selecting views on data in a systematic way so that experts on the data can employ their knowledge and thoughts efficiently for their purposes.