The Data Warehouse

Data warehouse is a modern term. A data warehouse is the store of an organization's data, where the informational assets of the organization are kept and managed, to support various activities such as reporting, analysis, decision-making, as well as other activities such as support for optimization of organizational operational processes. In a supermarket or other commercial organisation all transactions and important operational events that occur in the life of an organization are stored in the data warehouse. This data is stored and cataloged for immediate and future use in various forms. It is through these various uses that this data becomes information, to be potentially exploited for benefit of the company.

Data Warehouses became a distinct type of database during the late 1980's and early 1990's. They developed to meet a growing demand for management information and analysis that could not be met by operational systems. The main problem faced by a company once it has created a data warehouse is that the volume of data and and potential information it contains is massive. The value of the data is greatly enhanced if it can be converted into information. One way supermarkets do this is by use of the loyalty card. Customers supply a great deal of personal information when they buy a card. This information can be used to provide a context for the data derived from the purchases that ave been made.

Even so with so much information it can be difficult to find the means to make the information relevant.

DATA MINING is the process of automatically searching large volumes of data for patterns such as association rules. A patern in the context of a supermarket might be "single men between 20 and 30 years old buy alcohol in 85% of trips to the store" If the system can find a rule of this sort it has converted the information into knowledge. Data mining has been cited as the method by which the U.S. Army unit Able Danger supposedly had identified the 9/11 attack leader, Mohamed Atta, and three other 9/11 hijackers as possible members of an al Qaeda cell operating in the U.S. more than a year before the attack.

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