DAMEWARE: A web cyberinfrastructure for astrophysical data mining

Astronomy is undergoing through a methodological revolution triggered by an unprecedented wealth of complex and accurate data. The new panchromatic, synoptic sky surveys require ad- vanced tools for discovering patterns and trends hidden behind data which are both complex and of high dimensionality. We present DAMEWARE (DAta Mining & Exploration Web Application & REsource): a general purpose, web-based, distributed data mining environment developed for large data sets exploration, and finely tuned for astronomical applications. By means of graphical user interfaces, it allows to perform classification, regression or clustering tasks with machine learning methods. Salient features of DAMEWARE include its capability to work on large datasets with minimal human intervention, and to deal with a wide variety of real problems. With the aim of providing potential users with all needed information, in this paper we shortly describe the technological background of DAMEWARE, give a short introduction to some rele- vant aspects of data mining followed by a summary of some science cases and, finally, we provide a detailed description of a template use case.