Development of an Intelligent Data Analysis System for Knowledge Management in Environmental Data Bases

In this work, the goals of the ongoing research project “Development of an Intelligent Data Analysis System for Knowledge Management in Environmental Data Bases” are presented. This project started in 2000, and the Spanish Government will finance it until 2003. Its main goal is to design and develop a prototype of a tool for intelligent data analysis and implicit knowledge management of databases, with special focus on environmental databases. It is remarkable the high quantity of information and knowledge patterns implicit in large databases coming from the monitoring of any system or dynamical environmental process. For instance, historical data collected about meteorological phenomena in a certain area, about the performance of a wastewater treatment plant, about characterising environmental emergencies (toxic substances wasting, inflammable gas expansion), or about geomorphologycal description of seismic activity. Differing from the existing commercial systems, the more relevant aspects of this proposal are: the interaction of the developed methods, the development of mixed techniques that can cooperate among them to extract the knowledge contained in data, the existence of dynamical data analysis, and the existence of a recommender agent, which will suggest the best method to be used depending on the target domain and on the goals specified by users. The purpose of the paper is to present the architecture of the system as well as some of the methods it incorporates.