Developing an open knowledge discovery support system for a network environment

Knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) is a highly complex process where a lot of data manipulation tools with different characteristics can, and in fact have to, be used together in an interactive and iterative fashion, to reach the goal of previously unknown, potentially useful information extraction. In this paper we analyze the major sources of complexity in the framework of network organizations, pointing out the necessity to give support to the user in many different ways and at very different levels of granularity, from the use of a single tool, to the management of whole, distributed, KDD projects. Unfortunately, currently available systems lack to support the users in at least some of these features. We then propose a solution based on the service oriented computing paradigm, arguing that the advantages of this paradigm, namely openness, modularity, reusability and transparency, as well as ubiquity, can help in the design of an effective support system for knowledge discovery in databases in network environments