A tour of the screen

The WITNESS Miner screen contains four main parts, which are shown in the picture below.

Toolbars

The three toolbars allow you to access the tools and modes available in WITNESS Miner. The standard toolbar contains commands that allow you to open and save project files, the controls toolbar contains commands for selecting the current mode, and the nodes toolbar contains commands that allow you to create new nodes in the project.

For more details see the toolbars page.

Main workspace

The workspace is a graphical representation of the KDD process that WITNESS Miner is based on. By placing node icons on the workspace, you are including those KDD activities in the project. You can then link the nodes (or activities) together, and the lines show the flow of data between those activities. A set of linked nodes is called a KDD stream.

Each project file consists of a large scrollable workspace that can hold one or more KDD streams.

Project tree

The project tree summarises and complements the information available in the main workspace. Each KDD stream appears as a root item in the project tree, with its nodes making up the branches of the tree. You can expand or contract the tree by using the [+] and [-] controls to the left of each item.

If you expand a node in the tree, a list of options for that node is displayed with their current values. One of the benefits of viewing KDD streams in the project tree window is that you can view the options for a node without having to edit it in the main workspace. Note that there are no options for the statistics and view nodes.

Nodes that have been created on the workspace but which have not yet been connected to a database (that is, a data source node) are displayed under the special root item named KDD Tasks.

 

Context menu

Click on a node (either in the tree or in the workspace) with the right-hand mouse button to display a context menu, which allows you to edit the node, link it to other nodes in the stream (or unlink it), add comments, rename, clone or delete it. It also allows you to run the KDD stream that the node belongs to.

Project log

The project log window keeps track of the activities that have occurred during the execution of a stream. It logs the duration of each activity and the results.

If a stream fails to run, WITNESS Miner displays an error message on screen and also logs the error in the project log window.

You can clear the contents of the project log window by selecting the clear log contents command from the edit menu. You can copy text that you have highlighted in the project log window by selecting the copy log contents command from the edit menu, then paste it into a text editor or word processing program.