MAMView: a visual tool for exploring and understanding metric access methods

The MAMView framework is a data exploration tool that allows developers and users of Metric Access Methods (MAMs) to explore and share dynamic and interactive 3D presentations of a MAM, making the understanding of those structures easier. It is able to create visual representations of metric datasets, including high-dimensional and non-dimensional information. This is achieved by using an extension of the FastMap algorithm. This framework was developed as a practical tool that has been successfully applied to study existing MAMs, helping both new and experienced users to better understand them. The MAMView was also applied to a new under development MAM. With MAMView in hands, the development team of this MAM was able to drill-down its algorithms, quickly finding problems and also potential points for improvement and optimizations. Our focus on this work is on proposing an intuitive yet powerful visualization framework that can be easily employed to build intuitive visual presentations that can bypass the drawback of MAMs dealing with datasets with no spatial representation. Besides MAMView being a powerful visualization tool, its greatest strengths are the ability to interactively explore a visual presentation of a MAM at any level of detail, and the ability to seamlessly query and produce graphical representations in XML format that can be straightforward executed. This paper presents the MAMView framework and its main techniques, describes the current tool, and reports on our experiences in applying it to real applications.