ABSTRACT
Geographic Information Systems organize vast amounts of data, but that does not mean that all the information they contain is easy to access . You have to know what you are looking for and you need tools which enable you to search the data effectively. There are two main alternatives : setting automatic analytic procedures loose on the data to see what they come up with (an extreme version of data mining); and using exploratory data analysis . Obviously, the most successful approach will be a judicious mixlure of the two, using exploratory methods to guide where and how data mining should be employed, and using data mining to generate subsets of information of interest to be investigated in depth with exploratory methods. OUf work concentrates on the introduction and develop ment of new graphical tools for exploratory analyses.
