Posted by Denham on October 25, 2000 at 09:40:22:

In Reply to: K from D/I posted by Gautam on October 25, 2000 at 05:58:37:

Greetings Gautam,

Is it possible to get knowledge from either information or data? Folks who sell data mining, automatic profiling, search engines and text analysis software and services would have you believe it is. They label this exercise 'knowledge discovery'. Somehow I think they are responsible for some serious market 'spin'. True their algorithms can help to reveal patterns, latent structure, connections, relationships and clusters but this is hardly knowledge.

Knowledge happens when you engage others is a dialog around those patterns, when there is social verification of their usefulness and when the context for their application has been examined and made explicit.

There are many ways to surface patterns. Do a search using keywords like data mining, text analysis, pattern recognition, knowledge discovery. Before you start you will need to understand your goal and the nature of the data / information you are working with, i.e. is it text or numeric?, structured or unstructured?, in normal form or are there dependencies among the variables?, is the data clean?, how will you deal with missing values, can you identify individuals or are you working with aggreates....... The whole area of data mining and text analysis is huge, there are many approaches e.g. statistical, black box modeling, simulation, mixed mode & model analysis. Not an easy field to just jump into and do well and one that requires familarity with both the tools, the data and the application area.

Good luck.

• knowledge discovery notes

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Follow Ups:

• Re: K from D/I Vaughn P Fox 13:14:27 10/27/00 (3)
  • Implicit decisions Denham 14:45:33 10/27/00 (2)
    • Re: Implicit decisions Vaughn P Fox 23:41:37 10/27/00 (1)
      • Re: Implicit decisions Denham 01:49:51 10/28/00 (0)

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