Today’s growing wealth of digital data in Europe is poorly exploited. Advances in storage, pervasive computing, digital sensors and instrumentation have led to massive growth in the volume of data collected and the number and complexity of data repositories. This growing wealth of data has an increasing potential to yield great benefits to citizens, science and business as it contains vital hidden knowledge.
Typically, to extract that knowledge requires data-mining combinations of data from multiple data resources. Designers, diagnosticians, decision makers or researchers who need such knowledge face difficult hurdles. To extract information from heterogeneous and distributed sites they have to specify, in great detail, the sources of data, the mechanisms for integrating them and the data mining strategies for exposing the hidden gems of information. Consequently, with the current state of the art, most of that hidden knowledge remains undiscovered.
EPCC is leading a European Union-funded research project to develop a solution to this huge data challenge. The ADMIRE project (Advanced Data Mining and Integration Research for Europe) [1] will accelerate access to, and increase the benefits that can be gained from, data exploitation for the European citizen and economy. It will achieve this by delivering consistent and easy-to-use technology for extracting information and knowledge. To cope with complexity, change and heterogeneity of services, data, and processes, an abstract view of data-mining and integration will be provided. This will provide power to users and developers of data-mining and integration processes.
ADMIRE will explore two detailed data-intensive scenarios to test the technology:
1. Flood modelling and simulation.
2. Customer relationship management.
The flood modelling and simulation application is a cascade of meteorological, hydrological and hydraulic models, which together allow users to predict flood hazards based on meteorological forecasts. ADMIRE provides an excellent opportunity to advance the model, and provide additional analytical tools which will speed up the simulation process and allow users to take better-informed decisions in controlling the workflow and data management within the application.
The customer relationship management application provides support to “front office” business processes including sales, marketing and service. Each interaction with a customer is generally added to a customer’s contact history, and staff can retrieve information on customers from the database as necessary. Through integrating the CRM application with ADMIRE the application will be extended from a tool primarily for sales operatives to an analytical tool for anagers, allowing them to respond more quickly and accurately to customer needs.
Europe leads the world in its use and development of advanced service-orientated business solutions. By focusing on advanced data-mining and integration, ADMIRE will advance such enterprise systems by showing how an integrated approach can deliver significant new capabilities with which to address the next generation of digital data challenges. As well as managing the project, EPCC also provides a strong technical contribution based upon previous experience of developing the OGSA-DAI data access and integration technology that will play a major part in the ADMIRE architecture. Additionally EPCC brings considerable datamining experience from previous commercial and research projects.
Contact: Rob Baxter
[1] Project website: www.admire-project.eu