the operation iterations are ceased upon satisfaction of a termination criteria the resulting data view can then be presented to an analyst the methods can facilitate a users 39 knowledge discovery tasks and assist in finding relevant patterns trends and anomalies application_number US 77512510 A description the following description includes the preferred best mode of one embodiment of the present invention it will be clear from this description of the invention that the invention is not limited to these illustrated embodiments but that the invention also includes a variety of modifications and embodiments thereto therefore the present description should be seen as illustrative and not limiting while the invention is susceptible of various modifications and alternative constructions it should be understood that there is no intention to limit the invention to the specific form disclosed but on the contrary the invention is to cover all modifications alternative constructions and equivalents falling within the spirit and scope of the invention as defined in the claims the following description of the present invention uses a mathematical formalism that is similar to the mathematical tools required to analyze olap databases but is different in a number of ways as well for example projections i on dimensions and restrictions j on records are combined into a lattice theoretical object called a view d i j furthermore olap concerns databases organized around collections of variables which can be distinguished as dimensions which have a hierarchical structure and whose cartesian product forms the data cube 39 s schema and measures which can be numerically aggregated within different slices of that schema the present description considers cubes with a single integral measure which in some embodiments is the count of a number of records in the underlying database however any.