Data and Mining and Business Intelligence
Data Mining
The general aim of Data Mining is to find useful patterns in large data collections. In purchase data allows to identify typical buying behavior of costumers or to segment costumers into different groups. Implicitly, Data Mining can often be regarded as optimization, as the patterns that are discovery are usually employed to optimize a given process. The analysis of buying behavior aims, for instance, at increasing sells, the analysis of link patterns on the internet aims at improving web search, analysis of image data is used to optimize the recognition capabilities of robots, etc.
Data Mining is an interdisciplinary field that combines such techniques as information extraction, data storage and preprocessing, statistical analysis and visualization. Most current Data Mining systems, as Yale, support the complete chain from data gathering to the inspection of results.
The field of Data Mining has experienced a considerable growth as the amount of data that can collected and processed increased by several orders of magnitude, as a result of new storage and access technology. Currently, several big companies employ Data Mining as core part of their business. Popular examples are, for instance, Amazon, Google or Yahoo.
Web Mining
The recent dramatic growth of the Internet has made it the largest and probably most important data source currently available. The range of information that can be gathered on the Web is virtually unlimited, including information about
people, events, products, homemade or professional videos, pictures, scientific
and technical resources and many more. In contrast to many other data sources, as
e.g. closed data bases, most information on the Web is freely available. Moreover, on the Web, the traditional distinction between information provider and information consumer is blurred. Anyone can contribute information by creating webpages, by writing reviews or by using any of the numerous Web 2.0 applications that emerge on a daily basis.
Gathering information from the web for data mining differs in several points from traditional data mining in structured data bases. Data on the web is mostly scattered among several pages only connected by links and is often encoded in HTML without proper separation of content and presentation. Beside information based on HTML, many traditional data bases are available on the Internet through web service technologies.
Business Intelligence
The aim of business intelligence is discovery information about markets, costumers and competitors as to support decisions and to optimize business processes. It is therefore sometimes referred to as "competitive intelligence". The Business intelligence process includes the collection and preprocessing of relevant data, the discovery of useful patterns and the communication of the results to the management. The last step is usually referred to as "reporting".
As the business intelligence process is almost identical to the data mining process, almost all business intelligence solutions is based on Data Mining software, often only enriched by a knowledge management component.
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