The Tell-Tale Cube

The Intentional Analytics Model (IAM) has been recently envisioned as a new paradigm to couple OLAP and analytics. It relies on two basic ideas: (i) letting the user explore data by expressing her analysis intentions rather than the data she needs, and (ii) returning enhanced cubes, i.e., multidimensional data annotated with knowledge insights in the form of model components (e.g., clusters). In this paper we provide a proof-of-concept for the IAM vision by delivering an end-to-end implementation of describe, one of the five intention operators introduced by IAM. Among the research challenges left open in IAM, those we address are (i) automatically tuning the size of models (e.g., the number of clusters), (ii) selecting the most effective chart or graph for visualizing each cube depending on its features, and (iii) devising a visual metaphor to display enhanced cubes and interact with them.