Detecting user focus in OLAP analyses

International audienceIn this paper, we propose an approach to automatically detect focused portions of data cube explorations by using different features of OLAP queries. While such a concept of focused interaction is relevant to many domains besides OLAP explorations, like web search or interactive database exploration, there is currently no precise formal, commonly agreed definition. This concept of focus phase is drawn from Exploratory Search, which is a paradigm that theorized search as a complex interaction between a user and a system. The interaction consists of two different phases: an exploratory phase where the user is progressively defining her information need, and a focused phase where she investigates in details precise facts, and learn from this investigation. Following this model, our work is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to propose a formal feature-based description of a focused query in the context of interactive data exploration. Our experiments show that we manage to identify focused queries in real navigations, and that our model is sufficiently robust and general to be applied to different OLAP navigations datasets