Issues in Visualizing Large Databases

In this paper, we describe our concepts to visualize very large amounts of data. Our visualization techniques which have been developed to support querying large scientific databases are designed to visualize as many data items as possible on current display devices. Even if we are able to use each pixel of the display device to visualize one data value, the number of data items that can be visualized is quite limited. Therefore, in our system we consider only those data items which are ‘close’ to a user-specified query. The data items are arranged according to their distance from the query. Multiple windows are used for the different attributes of the data and the distance of each of the attributes from the query is represented by color. After briefly describing the basic ideas of our visualization techniques, in this paper we focus on two specific issues which arise in connection with our visualization techniques: First, we compare the data space which is the amount of information available in the database to the visualization space which is the amount of information that can be visualized by our visualization techniques. Second, we discuss the usefulness of different color models for our distance-to-color mapping and define a new color model which produces adequate color scales.