Rave uses two parallel mechanisms to store your information: Data sets and Analyses. Each of these is described on its own page.

The summary is:

• Data sets contain your actual data and the supporting information needed to interpret it. This includes the data itself, the name of each variable, the type of each variable (continuous, discrete, string, etc.), and the names of any functions that are used to calculate the data.
• Analyses contain supporting information related to how you are using your data sets. This includes things like a list of which rows of the data set are selected, what color to use to draw each row (in some visualizations), what ranges of the independent variables to use when running optimization, and what values of the independent variables define the "current point" for drawing continuous visualizations.

When you start Rave, you must load one or more data sets before you can do anything else. An initial analysis (named "Default Analysis") is created for you. Each time you load a new data set, all your Analyses are updated with initial values for the new data set (i.e. your Analyses will never become outdated). Each Analysis stores information related to every one of your data sets, so most of the time you will only need one analysis.

The only reason to create a new Analysis is so that you can manage multiple sets of the information that Analyses contain, which effectively lets you create groups of interactive visualizations that are linked within each group but not across groups. Since by default all visualizations belong to the same Default Analysis, they will all be linked to each other until you create additional Analyses and assign different (groups of) visualizations to each Analysis.