Spatial Data Mining. Theory and Application

Аннотация

Advances in technology have extended computers from meeting general computing needs to becoming sophisticated systems for simulating human vision, hearing, thinking and other high-level intelligence needs. Developers who envisioned building computerized expert systems in the past, however, quickly encountered the problem of establishing a suitable expert knowledge base. Subsequently, they turned to machine learning in an effort to develop a computer with self-learning functions similar to humans. But they too faced a question: from what source does the computer learn? Meanwhile, large amounts of data were becoming available more and more rapidly, and the developers came to the realization that a lot of knowledge is hidden inside the data. The information can be retrieved from databases via database management systems, and the knowledge also can be extracted from databases via data mining (or knowledge discovery), which then might further constitute a knowledge base for a computerized expert system automatically.