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PC Magazine, June 30, 2003

Companies like digiMine, Autonomy, ClearForest, and iPhrase Technologies sell software that uses complex algorithms to look for relationships between data points that are either spread across multiple data warehouses or collected into one.

Government agencies can certainly benefit from data mining. In fact, Autonomy and other companies are supplying the U.S. Department of Homeland Security with software to share and analyze data. But retailers seem to use the technology best. Microsoft's Web site for its popular game console, the Microsoft Xbox, uses digiMine to study Web activity and map it against marketing data. The goal is to sell more products and tailor the site to individuals' tastes.

Web logs of Xbox's site visitors are stored in a data warehouse that digiMine hosts, while customers' personal information is stored at Microsoft. Site managers in 27 countries, as well as Xbox marketing staff, can initiate a data query from a Web browser. digiMine then extracts the relevant data, such as players of the game Halo who have read the site's article on Star Wars: The Clone Wars and indicated an interest in buying any game within the last ten days by clicking through to one of Xbox online's retail partners. Once digiMine returns the information, Xbox marketers can map the data against its internal database to create targeted e-mail offers.

Some data-mining solutions are customer facing, offering friendly interfaces for self-service customer support and research. Charles Schwab uses data-mining technology from iPhrase to power its online search tool. As a simple example, someone can ask the system, "What is the difference between a stop order and a limit order?" Rather than just showing entire documents that describe types of orders, iPhrase mines data files and presents only the relevant information.

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