VIRTUAL GOLD ANNOUNCES VIRTUALMINER FRAMEWORK; PATENT-PENDING TECHNOLOGY DEMYSTIFIES THE ART OF DEVELOPING SOPHISTICATED DATA MINING APPLICATIONS

Virtual Gold, Inc., a company founded by Dr. Inderpal Bhandari, the inventor of IBM's Advanced Scout data mining technology for coaches of the National Basketball Association, has announced the VirtualMiner Framework. With VirtualMiner's breakthrough technology, creating, deploying and using data mining applications in an Internet/Intranet environment is now as simple as creating, deploying and using a typical querying front-end for an SQL database.

Researchers at Virtual Gold, Inc. discovered that there is an equivalence between the simpler, traditional querying applications and the more complex, data mining applications and devised a patent-pending method to exploit that equivalence in decision support systems. The VirtualMiner Framework is an application development framework based on this unique, ground-breaking technology. It automatically relates data mining techniques that find hidden patterns in large amounts of data with the more traditional querying mechanisms used in SQL or other database front-end applications, querying & reporting applications, on-line analytical processing applications, etc., thus demystifying the art of developing effective data mining applications.

VirtualMiner has application programming interfaces and built-in intelligence to help data providers, database vendors, data mining vendors and application developers create more powerful and user-friendly decision support applications than would otherwise be possible. Consequently, it provides every player in the data warehouse arena with the opportunity to introduce data mining as a natural extension of their current offerings; and develop new streams of revenue based on that extension:

• Data Providers: VirtualMiner shows data providers how to create and deploy data mining applications that are based on their core data products. These valued-added applications can generate additional revenue from their customer base.
• Database and Embedded Database Product Vendors: VirtualMiner provides vendors of database products and vendors of embedded database products, e.g., ERP vendors, OLAP vendors, with the means to offer their customers an application development framework that includes a customizable end-user interface, data mining capability to enhance core querying capabilities such as SQL or OLAP, and the means to deploy those extended capabilities in an internet/intranet environment; and the extension of existing client-server applications to include a new data mining capability without having to re-write those applications. These offerings can result in new revenue streams for the vendor.
• Data Mining Product Vendors: VirtualMiner provides vendors of data mining products with the means to simplify their current offerings to make them amenable to use by the many developers of traditional, querying applications, thereby broadening market penetration of their data mining products and increasing gross revenue.
• Vendors of database and data mining products: VirtualMiner provides vendors who produce both database and data mining products with a means of integrating their products. The result is a database product distinguished by the inclusion of a new data mining capability.
• End Users: The end user of applications developed using the VirtualMiner framework benefits by gaining access to powerful, and yet easy-to-use, tools that exploit the equivalence between traditional querying mechanisms and data mining techniques as enabled by VirtualMiner. The result is more powerful and userfriendly decision support applications, and consequently, better insight into data, information enhancement and knowledge discovery.
• Lastly but perhaps most significantly, VirtualMiner is a major breakthrough for Application Developers!

In stark contrast to database technology, data mining has not yet become a mainstream technology for application developers. Unlike the database application tools that are widely available, data mining remains an obscure technology, inaccessible to most database application developers because of the complexity of the underlying mathematics. Application developers, who want to create data mining products or to include a data mining capability in traditional querying applications, are instantly enabled with VirtualMiner's built-in intelligence that renders the task of developing data mining applications to turnkey.

VirtualMiner provides application developers with the tools to create customized query interfaces for web database applications. These applications can interact with a variety of data sources and are web-enabled, in that they can be invoked from any Java-enabled web browser, thereby eliminating the difficulty associated with crossplatform deployment across an enterprise; and reducing training time for new users. The VirtualMiner framework can also enable the addition of data mining capabilities to existing database query applications as well; thus potentially allowing yesterday's database applications to make use of today's data mining technologies.

"We see VirtualMiner as the vehicle to bring data mining into the mainstream of application development", says Dr. Inderpal S. Bhandari, CEO of Virtual Gold, Inc. "The technological underpinnings are in place. It is now time to identify business partners who can help us execute this strategy".

The VirtualMiner Framework has been developed by Virtual Gold, Inc. (http://www.virtualgold.com), a data mining company with headquarters at Hartsdale, NY. Parties interested in the product should contact Virtual Gold for details.

Virtual Gold, Inc. was founded by former IBM researcher Dr. Inderpal S. Bhandari, with a mission to simplify and mainstream sophisticated data mining applications. Dr. Bhandari invented the IBM Advanced Scout data mining program, used extensively by coaches of the National Basketball Association to identify new strategies based on hidden patterns in game data and video.