Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper describes an initial cognitive framework that captures the reasoning involved in scientific data analyses, drawing from close collaborations with scientists in different domains over many years. The framework aims to automate data analysis for science. In doing so, existing large repositories of data could be continuously and systematically analyzed by machines, updating findings and potentially making new discoveries as new data becomes available. The framework consists of a cycle with six phases: formulating an investigation, initiating the investigation, getting data, analyzing data, aggregating results, and integrating findings. The paper also describes our implementation of this framework and illustrates it with examples from different science domains.