Knowledge Discovery in an Object-Oriented Oceanographic Database System Annual Report

The rate at which scientific data is collected today has overwhelmed the ability of scientists to store and analyze the data. Current research in knowledge discovery in databases is addressing this problem by developing techniques that can automatically extract knowledge of interest in a particular problem domain. This report describes the results of the second year's efforts in the development of a knowledge discovery system for use by oceanographers at the Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO) at the Stennis Space Center in the identification of certain oceanographic features. The system is composed of a knowledge discovery component built to interact with a database system currently in use at Stennis Space Center. The database system will be extended to store metadata and knowledge extracted by the knowledge discovery component. Working with scientists at NAVOCEANO, we determined that the focus of our work is the identification and characterization of regions of sand waves in acoustic imagery data.