Briefs

Rodney Gedda, Computerworld

19/09/2005 07:15:35

Despite its strong ties to proprietary software vendors, the Australian Taxation Office has finally dipped its toes into open source by establishing a Linux-based system for information analytics.

Tax has had a Teradata warehouse for 10 years but the change program initiated by chief knowledge officer Philip Hind in November last year is a "series of activities to enhance the ATO's ability to collect and analyse data", assistant commissioner of information management John Body told Computerworld.

As a result the ATO invested in Teradata's Warehouse Miner, SAS Enterprise Miner, and hired CSIRO's principal computer scientist for enterprise data mining Dr Graham Williams who pioneered open source analytics for organizations like the Health Insurance Commission and NRMA.

In addition to the basic tools, Tax has also deployed open source data mining and data manipulation packages, including "R" - a statistical and data mining package widely used in industry and academia that supports modern data mining approaches and graphing capabilities. R is used for data summarization, manipulation and cleaning, modeling, and model evaluation.

Tax is also using Weka, a Java-based data mining toolkit with more than 60 traditional and modern analytic tools.

Here is the rest of the story.