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April 16, 2007
Retailer found guilty of OLAP
"It's the most flagrant case of aggregation I have ever seen," said the prosecutor.
Ok, I'm kidding. Yet today I did find a headline in the Charlotte Observer: "Lenders accused of data mining." In this case, the financers in question were illegitimately searching a database of student borrowers. There is no doubt that the public have valid concerns over potential misuse of data, but it is awkward (for those who used the term in a rather more limited way) to see the good name of a useful technology tainted in the process.
This new usage - data mining as database search – is easy to see in a press release from Senator Russ Feingold. Data Mining, he says, is “is a broad search of public and non-public databases in the absence of a particularized suspicion about a person, place or thing.”
Most vendors who, until recently, described their technology as data mining now talk about predictive analytics. It is an attractive phrase for vendors and commentators, having a technical ring to it, without being intimidating. Currently I use this idiom myself, much more than data mining. Unfortunately, the term is not entirely accurate. Many uses of data mining, predictive analysis or knowledge discovery (an even rarer term these days) are primarily descriptive, to enable business analysts to understand their data better, without querying the model for predictions.
As it happens, while I may regret the inconvenience that a useful term has drifted from my own usage, I see no reason to complain. I have no time for those who talk about the “real” meaning of words. The current meaning of a word or phrase is determined by its usage and I am not going to fight that. Between friends, I may continue to have a gay old time chatting about data mining; but in public, I need to be aware that the meaning has moved on.
However, I do have to wonder what phrase the press will next appropriate to capture the public’s finely nuanced paranoia. I could take a guess. Senator Feingold, points out that data mining in his sense requires “a combination of intelligence data and personal information, including an individual's traffic violations, credit card purchases, travel records, medical records, communications records, and virtually any information collected on commercial, public or private governmental databases.” I think we may have to start looking around for an alternative to CDI …
Posted by Donald Farmer at April 16, 2007 2:24 PM
