Mirage: A Visual Tool for Scientific Inquiries into the VO Archives
01 January 2008
A fundamental need in analyzing data from large archives is to find correlations among different objects or events. Mirage is a graphical tool that addresses this need. Specifically, it offers intuitive graphical operations to track correlations across different attributes and views of the same objects, or correlations among different levels of analysis. By providing means to display data together with results of automatic classification, it facilitates interactions between human and machine pattern recognition. By offering utilities to connect to the VO archives, external web services, dynamic data streams, and statistical analysis libraries, it provides a platform for integrating several modern technologies into the scientific inquiry process. We describe the functionality of Mirage, its connections to the NVO, and ongoing developments.