JDM Strategy - Java Data Mining: Strategy, Standard, and Practice - page 101

5.1 What Is the JDM Strategy?

Historically, data mining has been the domain of statisticians and
data analysts. Sophisticated businesses often developed propri-
etary algorithms or implemented published algorithms by hiring
experts with advanced degrees in statistics and machine learning.
As data mining technology evolved, commercial tools entered the
market, providing more general purpose tools that could be used
by these same experts. However, a technology that can explain and
predict behavior and outcomes, as well as automatically categorize
and derive hidden associations among objects, should be more
readily available to enhance applications. Although commercial
tools go far toward making the raw technology more accessible, it
is still difficult for many businesses to reap the benefits of data
mining.
For example, many data mining tools provide complex graphi-
cal interfaces for performing data mining. This often results in the
problem of how to deploy the results to business processes or
applications. To address this problem, data mining vendors pro-
duced proprietary application programming interfaces (APIs) to
their products to enable programmatic control. These APIs ranged
from using traditional programming languages like C

[Kernighan 2005] and Java [Weka 2005], to proprietary inter-

preted languages [Darwin 2005]. As discussed later in this chapter,
the diversity in interfaces comes at a cost to vendors, developers,
and businesses.
The JDM interfaces are defined as a pure Java specification, in
which either client, server, or both can be implemented purely in
Java. However, JDM also allows vendors to implement the system
behind the Java interface specification in any implementation
technology or programming language. This enables vendors with
established products to wrap their products with the JDM
interface.
JDM began and remains an open, pure Java, multivendor stan-
dard. An open standard can be defined as being

publicly available specifications for achieving a specific task. By allowing anyone to
use the standard, [open standards] increase compatibility between various hardware
and software components since anyone with the technical know-how and the neces-
sary equipment to implement solutions can build something that works together with
those of other vendors. [Wikipedia 2006a]

Here are 10 strategic objectives for JDM.