Developing Association Rules in Facilities Management Databases

Data mining is a recent development in the field of database exploration. A powerful and well investigated topic is the discovery of association rules. This paper examines the use of association rules within the domain of facilities management. Within such a domain the application of association rules offers a way of identifying relationships between sets of data which may previously have been thought to be completely unrelated. We describe algorithms for the development of association graphs and expansion trees to.identify such relationships in response to loosely defined user queries. This provides a means to examine many possible relationships prior to exposing an interesting one.