Over the last decade, a dramatic increase has been observed in the ability of individual experimental scientists to generate and store data, which has not been matched by an equivalent development of adequate data management tools. ZOO is a generic Desktop Experiment Management Environment that can be customized and placed on the desks of many scientists to manage their experimental studies. Early experiences with a first prototype of Zoo have indicated that, as with general database systems, one of the biggest challenges lies with the system's user interface. The goal of this project is to investigate several hard problems related to advanced database user interfaces that appear particularly important for experiment management. These include problems related to schema visualization, experiment flow modeling, visual query languages, dynamic queries, approximate query answers, incremental queries, and others. This work proceeds in a tight loop between developing generic database user interface technology, incorporating the resulting techniques into ZOO, and installing customized enhancements of the tool in real-life experimentation environments for evaluation and feedback. The expected results of this research will advance the state of the art in database user interfaces and will be incorporated into the ZOO tools. Empowered with this fashion, ZOO will reach the necessary maturity to be placed in actual experiment production environments and enable scientists to manage their experimental studies efficiently and effectively.
