Data mining, data warehousing, decision support and knowledge discovery make up the universe of DSstar, the only executive business newsletter supporting strategic employment of these technologies.

The On-Line Executive Journal for Data-Intensive Decision Support
*** Jul 27, 1999: Vol. 3, No. 30 ***
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IN THIS ISSUE:

WHAT IS THE CORRECT WAY TO CATEGORIZE YOUR DATA?
OBTAINING REAL-TIME DATA ON INTERNET ADS
BANKBOSTON USES CUSTOMER RELATION DECISION SUPPORT

ANALYSIS & COMMENTARY

A LOST ART: CATEGORIZING YOUR DATA
By Zak Pines

Executive Editor-at-Large Inderpal Bhandari presents a guest editorial by a member of Virtual Gold's Research and Development Team:

An essential part of data preparation is attribute categorization, an important and potentially overlooked piece of the data mining puzzle. If attributes are improperly categorized, then the data mining analyst will miss out on significant results. Categorizing attributes allows the data miner to find patterns about groups of numbers. The goal of any data miner is to find meaningful results, and properly categorizing attributes can help to do so.

NEW SERVICE PROVIDES DATA ON INTERNET ADS
By Stuart Elliott For The NY Times

The service, Leading Web Advertisers, is intended to deliver reports to subscribers that its founders say will capture and categorize ads on hundreds of sites, offering data on which marketers are running ads, when and where those ads appeared and what they looked like. The goal is to help bring accountability to the new media as ad spending in cyberspace continues its rapid growth.

INFORMIX TAKES DIFFERENT ROAD TO THE NET
By Wylie Wong

The new database, called the Informix Internet Foundation.2000, offers many of the same features as the Web-centric Oracle 8i database released four months ago. It sports a Java Virtual Machine for running Java code and a built-in application server that processes online transactions and runs the business logic of software. It supports not only traditional text data, but also video, HTML files, and other multimedia content.

BANKBOSTON OPTIMIZES DISTRIBUTION NETWORK WITH CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM

By studying how, when and where customers make their transactions, the Bank is now better equipped to make sound distribution decisions -- such as where best to locate branches and ATMs. The result is a win-win situation: customers benefit as their preferences and behaviors drive BankBoston's distribution management strategies, and the Bank benefits by making its network more efficient. In addition, customer satisfaction and retention are expected to increase as a result of enhanced channel deployment and utilization.

DATA MINING CONSORTIUM DEVELOPS PREDICTIVE MODELING OPEN STANDARD TO ENABLE MODEL SHARING BETWEEN DIFFERENT VENDORS' APPLICATIONS

The Data Mining Group (DMG), a consortium of technology organizations, has announced the first version of an XML-based open standard for defining predictive models. Marking an industry first, the Predictive Modeling Markup Language (PMML) provides a quick and easy way for companies to define predictive models and share models between compliant vendors' applications.

INTERNET BANKING AND E-COMMERCE TURN TO NEURAL COMPUTING IN THEIR BATTLE AGAINST BAD DEBT

This new solution enables banks and finance providers to quickly and easily reduce fraud by providing accurate decision-support, while ensuring that e-Commerce customers stay on-line throughout the credit granting process.

ACTION ITEMS

SPSS Drafting Recruits For Data Mining "Boot Camp"
The boot camp is designed to help decision makers learn how data mining can work for them. In addition, the series provides a step-by-step guide on how to establish profitable data mining within an enterprise.

Tantau Software Release New High-Speed Data Analysis Engine
A new super-fast data analysis engine has been released by Tantau Software.

Sterling Software to Acquire Information Advantage; Industry Pioneer Developed First Business Intelligence Portal
Sterling Software, Inc., one of the 20 largest independent software companies in the world, and Information Advantage, Inc., a leading provider of web-based and enterprise business intelligence software, have announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement for Sterling Software to acquire Information Advantage.

Pine Cone Systems Continues International Expansion; Signs Up Distribution Partners In Italy And Portugal
Pine Cone Systems Inc., a leading provider of data warehousing administration and management software solutions, has announced its continued expansion in Europe with the signing of international distribution agreements with Datamat in Italy and Novabase in Portugal.

DecisionPoint Applications Introduces Industry's First Packaged Data Warehouse Solution For Human Resources And Distribution
These two new DecisionPoint products provide organizations with access to the critical, detailed financial, human resources and distribution data stored in ERP production environments -- core information required for all commercial decision-making processes.

Microsoft Continues Innovations In Knowledge Management, Enabling Rich Information Sharing Between Business Systems
Microsoft Corp. has announced it will hold an open design review for gathering industry feedback on new metadata extensions that will enable a business to integrate its line-of-business, data warehousing, and knowledge management environments. Also recently, the Meta Data Coalition (MDC) formally announced that the Open Information Model (OIM) has been accepted as the metadata standard.

Artificial Life Wins Contract From Liechtenstein Global Trust For Smart Engine
Swiss-based Castle Private Equity AG and Castle Alternative Invest AG have selected Artificial Life to develop and install ALife-WebGuide Enterprise, a smart bot that will reside on their Web site to communicate with online clients in natural language (German).

Informix Establishes Leadership In TPC-H Decision Support Benchmark On Informix Dynamic Server With Advanced Decision Support Option
Informix Corporation, a technology leader in enterprise database powered solutions, has announced the setting of the leading figure in the 100 GB TPC-H benchmark metric that has recently been established by the Transaction Processing Council. TPC-H has been specified to reflect the ad hoc query performance that is paramount in the decision support setting, and succeeds the now defunct TPC-D benchmark.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"Standardizing model descriptions could open up the industry as HTML did when it became the language of the Internet."

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