Why aren there more/fancier visualization tools? When will more model visualization tools be available?
We added an RPT viewer in PROXIMITY 3.1 and an RDN viewer in PROXIMITY 4.0. The latest version, 4.3, includes a new and more detailed RPT viewer, and a powerful tool to visualize the entire database and subgraphs. We believe these tools are adequate for most needs, although there is of course room for improvement. Visualizing large graphs is a research area that is not our principal research focus. Contributions of visualization tools would be very welcome! (Contact us at proximity@kdl.cs.umass.edu.) • Why is getting a single item’s attributes so slow? By their nature, the techniques we need for efficient relational knowledge discovery are column-centric, and we’ve chosen a database technology (MonetDB) that optimizes such access. However, the trade-off is just what you’re experiencing—row-centric operations such as getting all attribute values for a single item are slow. Basically, MonetDB has to load an entire attribute table into memory to access only a few rows, repeating this for
