Knowledge Discovery

[Aimee Renee Frake]

To whom it may concern:

We are a group of students taking a survey for the Business Department of 
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  We are trying to 
determine the usage of "Knowledge Discovery" tools throughout health 
related companies.

If we receive your response before the 10th of April we will be happy to 
inform you about our results.

Definition of Terms Used:
*Data mining* is used to discover patterns and relationships in data.  
It can help humans analyze, understand, and digest enormous amounts of 
information stored in databases more efficiently and effectively.  Data 
mining is utilized in industries such as insurance, finance, marketing, 
medicine, and manufacturing.

*Knowledge Discovery (KD)* is an application that can perform an 
intelligent database analysis.  It is similar to data mining, but 
includes preprocessing and postprocessing of data as well as  
interpretation of the discovered patterns as knowledge.  KD will be able 
to address such things as marketing trends and predictions, operations 
behavior to identify inefficiencies and fraud, automatic classification 
of documents, and management support to improve operation.

1a) Company name (optional):
1b) In which industry is your company?
1c) How large (in terms of employees) is your overall company?
1d) How many of these employees are currently using data mining on a 
regular basis?

2a) Approximately what percent has access:
... to a computer in their office?
... to the Internet?
... to your company's main databases?
2b) Approximately what percent of the communication within your 
company is computer supported (e-mail, etc.)?
2c) Are there currently any employees working full time on improving the 
efficiency of the electronically supported information flow?

3a) What are the main purposes of your databases (in addition to 
administrative work)?
3b) Since when have databases been used for these purposes? 
3c) What tools are used when scanning your databases?
3d) What do you think are the strengths and weaknesses of these tools?
3e) Rank the importance of database work for your company's business 
(1=unimportant, 5=very important)!

4a) Have any efforts been made to use {KD}-tools (e.g. data mining or 
any Artificial Intelligence based applications)?
4b) What do you consider the most challenging problem with handling 
information nowadays?

Comments, suggestions, concerns:

Thank you for your cooperation!

How to contact us:  a-frake at uiuc.edu