Building Intelligent Models from Data Mining and Expert Knowledge

Abstract

While the idea of a data warehouse remains the core ideal of most corporate IT shops, the concepts surrounding the organization and architecture and, especially, the delivery mechanisms have changed remarkably. In today’s rapid changing and highly competitive marketplace, the idea of physical centralization has given way to a virtual data warehouse tied together with message-oriented middleware and distributed through application servers, Web servers, and intelligent database systems. The overriding influence in the corporate response to its information assets has been, of course, the dramatic rise of the Internet as a knowledge-bearing framework. From the global reach of the Internet, corporations have carved out their own pieces of this universe—intranets to bind together the information needs of the enterprise, extranets to solidify and control supply chains, and B2B and B2C service nets to give even the smallest corporation an equal footing with corporate giants as well as an essentially low-cost worldwide online presence. The Internet has given corporate decision-makers and knowledge workers a vast (and sometimes seemingly infinite) access to raw data—in fact, to “raw” knowledge.