UNLABELLED: The Summary Tree Explorer (STE) is a Java application for interactively exploring sets of phylogenetic trees using two coupled representations: a node-and-link diagram and a textual list of common clades. Selection, pruning, filtering or re-rooting in one representation is immediately reflected in the other. While summary trees are more effective at showing the relationship among clades, they can only show a consistent subset of those that appear in the textual list. Working with both representations mitigates the disadvantages of having to choose just one. AVAILABILITY: STE, along with several sample datasets, is available at http://cityscape.inf.cs.cmu.edu/phylogeny/

Custom interfaces, which we call appliances, allow users to efficiently carry out specialized tasks. Without one, a user is often required to perform repetitive mechanical steps using general purpose interfaces, which we call tools. Much research has attempted to enable non-programmers to create appliances for themselves. We present a system in which a user can choose an example of the task behavior to be automated from a visualization of his past operations. The example is transformed into a visual language, using two simple rules to generalize from the single example to a class of tasks. The user can then edit this representation directly, or continue to refine the example using selective undo and redo. The visual representation can be transformed into an esthetically pleasing appliance by deleting irrelevant components, and rearranging, resizing, and relabeling other components. Restricting the domain to data analysis tasks enables a well-matched visual query language to be used. Appliance interactions are automatically provided by the underlying interactive visualization system in which the appliance is embedded. An observational study suggests that this system represents a useful point on the ease-of-use vs. expressive power tradeoff appropriate for data analysis, and that the ability to choose and modify examples after the fact is helpful.

The ability to quickly explore and compare multiple scenarios is an important component of exploratory data analysis. Yet today's interfaces cannot represent alternative exploration paths as a branching history, forcing the user to recognize conceptual branch points in a linear history. Further, the interface can only show information from one state at a time, forcing the user to use her memory to compare scenarios.

Direct manipulation of visualizations is a powerful technique for performing exploratory data operations such as navigation, aggregation, and filtering.Its immediacy facilitates rapid, incremental, and ,reversible forays.into the *(data.However it does not provide for!reuse or modification of exploration sessions.This paper describes a visual query language, VQE, that adds these capabilities to a direct manipulation exploration environment called Visage.Queries and visualizations are' dynamically linked: operations on either one immediately update the other, in contrast to the feedforward sequence of database query followed by .visualization of results common in traditional systems.8, These features are supported by the architectural concept of threads,, which represent a sequence of navigation steps on particular objects.Because they are tied to, particular data objects, they can.be directly manipulated.: Because they represent operations, they can be generalized into queries.We expect this technique to apply to direct manipulation interfaces to any object-oriented system that represents both objects and the relationships among them.