Visual Farmer is a graphic wrap-around for the Farmer datamining tool. The source can be obtained here. A pre-compiled executable for Linux PCs is also available here. To compile and use it, the Qt library is necessary. On most Linux PC systems, this library is available, and it also exists for Windows 95/98/NT.
Status
Visual Farmer is stable, but some functionalities are not implemented. The query browsing interface is only basic. Planned additions are:
- only listing maximal interesting queries;
- listing of interesting subqueries by double-clicking;
- highlighting of interesting subquery by clicking on it.
Short introduction
A short introduction to Visual Farmer will be given here. Visual Farmer will be used to demonstrate an issue which has not been solved by Farmer (yet?).
Visual Farmer is simply started by typing visualfarmer. The graphic interface shows up immediately. To start the datamining process, go to the file menu and select open. As demonstration input the file bongard.s is provided, type that file as input file and click OK. A dialog shows the progress of the query search process. Once the process is finished, the OK button of this dialog is enabled and the dialog can be closed. The main screen should look like:
The upper part of the screen will show graphic representations of the frequent queries; the lower part (currently) shows a list of all frequent queries corresponding to leefs in the searchtree. The first column displays the support, the second column shows the query. By clicking on the header of a column, the queries can be sorted by support or by query length, respectively. After clicking on a query, its graphical representation is shown. For example:
Every white box corresponds to an atom of the query. A gray line connects the input of an atom to the output of another atom. A circle at the bottom of a box indicates an output; a circle at the top an input.
As the main purpose of the graphical display is to give a clearer insight in the structure of a query, also the possibility is added to drag around the white boxes, such that the user can manipulate the display at its own preference. By moving some of the boxes, the above query can become:
The left hand and the right hand side of this query show a remarkable ressemblance. At the left, the in atom is outputting a shape, while at the right, the in atom is inputting. However, the meaning of both sides is the same. One of the two could safely be removed.