Oasis is a flexible, extensible, and seamless environment for scientific data analysis, knowledge discovery, visualization, and collaboration. The authors describe how Oasis can help explore data analysis and data mining of spatio-temporal phenomena from large geophysical data sets.

Exploratory data mining and analysis for scientific hypothesis testing or phenomenon detection is an iterative, successive-refinement process. Scientists apply a preliminary model on the data and then use the outcome of a series of experiments to refine the model and methodology. They repeat this process until they either drop the hypothesis or refine it into one that is consistent with the collected data.

For such a research approach to be practical, scientists need a powerful system that supports

We are developing Oasis (open architecture scientific information system) to be such a system. In this article, we explain how scientists can use this flexible, extensible, and seamless computing environment for scientific data analysis, knowledge discovery, visualization, and collaboration.