Goal: Cracking the Knowledge Acquisition Bottleneck
One of WizWhy’s users, a branch of the U.S. Navy, develops intelligent applications for planning, discovery, and knowledge acquisition, and recently received a grant from the Office of Naval Research. The grant gave this branch not only the ability to study new data surveillance and prediction software tools available in the market and to determine their price/performance capabilities, but also by choosing leading edge software tools, they acquired the ability to attract new talent. Specifically, the department could investigate a way to fuse volumes of data in a meaningful way in order to permit data cleansing, analysis, modeling, and prediction. However, the grant provided only a modest budget and this department needed to be ‘up and running’ very quickly with these new capabilities. This meant they needed to source a COTS product – the Navy’s term for a “commercial off-the-shelf” product.
Data mining is useful for condensing and extrapolating military information. Data mining helped them to make sense out of arrays of complex distributed heterogeneous sensors. Their project began by collecting data and creating a database. Then a data mining application was applied to reveal hidden patterns and relationships within the database. A set of rules was revealed explaining the data and issuing predictions for new cases. Based on the discovered rules, unexpected phenomena in the data were pointed out as interesting phenomena. The system was used to study features towards cracking the knowledge acquisition bottleneck.
WizWhy was used to mine those features and to explore, by feedback, the most important features. This in turn provided a better understanding of their working domain and thereby permitted the evolution of more complex systems than would otherwise have been possible.
WizWhy allowed its user to significantly increase the amount of knowledge it can bring to bear on the decision-making process. Tools such as WizWhy will serve to crack the knowledge acquisition bottleneck, which has impeded the growth and dissemination of knowledge-based technologies. WizWhy facilitates the evolution of feature sets, since it ranks the variables in terms of their significance.
WizWhy cracked the knowledge acquisition bottleneck without cracking the budget!
