Service-Oriented Data Mining

A service is a software building block capable of fulfilling a given task or a distinct business function through a well-defined interface, loosely-coupled interface. Services are like "black boxes", since they operate independently within the system, external components are not aware of how they perform their function, they only care that they return the expected result. The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a flexible set of design principles used for building flexible, modular, and interoperable software applications. SOA represents a standard model for resource sharing in distributed systems and offers a generic framework towards the integration of diverse systems. Thus, information technology strategy is turning to SOA in order to make better use of current resources, adapt to more rapidly changes and larger development. Another principle of SOA is the reusable software components within different applications and processes. A Web Service (WS) is a collection of functions that are packaged as a single entity and published to the network for use by other applications through a standard protocol. It offers the possibility of transparent integration between heterogeneous platforms and applications. The popularity of web services is mainly due to the availability of web service standards and the adoption of universally accepted technologies, including XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI. The most important implementation of SOA is represented by web services. Web servicebased SOAs are now widely accepted for on-demand computing as well as for developing more interoperable systems. They provide integration of computational services that can communicate and coordinate with each other to perform goal-directed activities. Among intelligent systems, Data Mining (DM) has been the center of much attention, because it focuses on extracting useful information from large volumes of data. However, building scalable, extensible, interoperable, modular and easy-to-use data mining systems has proved to be difficult. In response, we propose SOMiner (Service Oriented Miner), a service-oriented architecture for data mining that relies on web services to achieve extensibility and interoperability, offers simple abstractions for users, provides scalability by cutting down overhead on the number of web services ported to the platform and supports computationally intensive processing on large amounts of data. This chapter proposes SOMiner, a flexible service-oriented data mining architecture that incorporates the main phases of knowledge discovery process: data preprocessing, data mining (model construction), result filtering, model validation and model visualization. This