A component and query approach for scientific data exploration applications

The immense increase of scientific databases, combined with the spread of open standards for service interfaces, has resulted in unprecedented opportunities of data exploration and exploitation for scientists. From a client point of view, scientists often perform data combination and analysis, based on interactive incremental refinement and visualization. While this abstract description applies to virtually any science, the concrete presentation of data and queries offered varies greatly across the individual domains. The result is a repetitive effort in crafting streamlined client interfaces, which is particular tedious in face of interactive graphics. We address this problem by establishing a modular Web client toolkit offering common analysis input and output widgets. The backend generates database queries from the input and displays query results through the output widgets. We present this toolkit, its first implementation version, and an earth science scenario using an Array Database System as retrieval backend.