A Conceptual Framework for Data Mining and Knowledge Management

Abstract

Over the last decade data warehousing and data mining tools have evolved from research into a unique and popular applications, ranging from data warehousing and data mining for decision support to business intelligence and other kind of applications. The chapter presents and discusses data warehousing methodologies along with the main components of data mining tools and technologies and how they all could be integrated together for knowledge management in a broader sense. Knowledge management refers to the set of processes developed in an organization to create, extract, transfer, store and apply knowledge. The chapter also focuses on how data mining tools and technologies could be used in extracting knowledge from large databases or data warehouses. Knowledge management increases the ability of an organization to learn from its environment and to incorporate knowledge into the business processes by adapting to new tools and technologies. Knowledge management is also about the reusability of the knowledge that is being extracted and stored in the knowledge base. One way to improve the reusability is to use this knowledge base as front-ends to case-based reasoning (CBR) applications. The chapter further focuses on the reusability issues of knowledge management and presents an integrated framework for knowledge management by combining data mining (DM) tools and technologies with CBR methodologies. The purpose of the integrated framework is to discover, validate, retain, reuse and share knowledge in an organization with its internal users as well as its external users. The framework is independent of application domain and would be suitable for uses in areas, such as data mining and knowledge management in e-government.