The use of data mining in the design and implementation of an incident report retrieval system

Incident reporting is becoming increasingly important in large organizations. Legislation is progressively being introduced to deal with this information. One example is the European Directive No. 94/95/EC, which obliges airlines and national bodies to collect and collate reports of incidents. Typically these organizations use manual files and standard databases to store and retrieve incident reports. However, research has established that database technology needs to be enhanced in order to deal with incidents. We describe the design and implementation of In-Ret, an incident report retrieval system that endeavours to find similarities and patterns between incidents by combining the strengths of case-based reasoning and information retrieval techniques in an integrated system. Preliminary results from InRet are presented and are encouraging.