Advanced Data And Information Systems And Advanced Applications

Heterogeneous Databases and Legacy Databases: A heterogeneous database consists of a set of interconnected, autonomous component databases. The components communicate in order to exchange information and answer queries. Objects in one component database may differ greatly from objects in other component databases, making it difficult to assimilate their semantics into the overall heterogeneous database.

Many enterprises acquire legacy databases as a result of the long history of information technology development (including the application of different hardware and operating systems). A legacy database is a group of heterogeneous databases that combines different kinds of data systems, such as relational or object-oriented databases, hierarchical databases, network databases, spreadsheets, multimedia databases, or file systems. The heterogeneous databases in a legacy database may be connected by intra or inter-computer networks.

Information exchange across such databases is difficult because it would require precise transformation rules from one representation to another, considering diverse semantics. Consider, for example, the problem in exchanging information regarding student academic performance among different schools. Each school may have its own computer system and use its own curriculum and grading system. One university may adopt a quarter systems, offer three courses on database systems, and assign grades from A to F, whereas another may adopt a semester system, offer two courses on databases, and assign grades from 1 to 10. It is very difficult to work out precise course-to-grade transformation rules between the two universities, making information exchange difficult. Data mining techniques may provide an interesting solution to the information exchange problem by performing statistical data distribution and correlation analysis, and transforming the given data into higher, more generalized, conceptual levels (such as fair, good, or excellent for student grades), fromwhich information exchange can then more easily be performed.

Data Streams: Many applications involve the generation and analysis of a new kind of data, called stream data, where data flow in and out of an observation platform (or window) dynamically. Such data streams have the following unique features: huge or possibly infinite volume, dynamically changing, flowing in and out in a fixed order, allowing only one or a smallnumber of scans, and demanding fast (often real-time) response time. Typical examples of data streams include various kinds of scientific and engineering data, time-series data, and data produced in other dynamic environments, such as power supply, network traffic, stock exchange, telecommunications, Web click streams, video surveillance, and weather or environment monitoring.

Because data streams are normally not stored in any kind of data repository, effective and efficient management and analysis of stream data poses great challenges to researchers. Currently, many researchers are investigating various issues relating to the development of data stream management systems.Atypical query model in such a system is the continuous query model, where predefined queries constantly evaluate incoming streams, collect aggregate data, report the current status of data streams, and respond to their changes.

Mining data streams involves the efficient discovery of general patterns and dynamic changes within stream data. For example, we may like to detect intrusions of a computer network based on the anomaly of message flow, which may be discovered by clustering data streams, dynamic construction of streammodels, or comparing the current frequent patterns with that at a certain previous time.Most stream data reside at a rather low level of abstraction, whereas analysts are often more interested in higher and multiple levels of abstraction. Thus, multilevel, multidimensional on-line analysis and mining should be performed on stream data as well.

TheWorld WideWeb: The World Wide Web and its associated distributed information services, such as Yahoo!, Google, America Online, and AltaVista, provide rich, worldwide, on-line informationservices, where data objects are linked together to facilitate interactive access.Users seeking information of interest traverse from one object via links to another. Such systems provide ample opportunities and challenges for data mining. For example, understanding user access patterns will not only help improve system design (by providing efficient access between highly correlated objects), but also leads to better marketing decisions (e.g., by placing advertisements in frequently visited documents, or by providing better customer/user classification and behavior analysis). Capturing user access patterns in such distributed information environments is called Web usage mining (or Weblog mining).

AlthoughWeb pages may appear fancy and informative to human readers, they can be highly unstructured and lack a predefined schema, type, or pattern. Thus it is difficult for computers to understand the semantic meaning of diverse Web pages and structure them in an organized way for systematic information retrieval and data mining. Web services that provide keyword-based searches without understanding the context behind the Web pages can only offer limited help to users. For example, a Web search based on a single keyword may return hundreds of Web page pointers containing the keyword, but most of the pointers will be very weakly related to what the user wants to find. Data mining can often provide additional help here than Web search services. For example, authoritative Web page analysis based on linkages among Web pages can help rank Web pages