JDM Strategy - Java Data Mining: Strategy, Standard, and Practice - page 102

Strategic Objective 1: Address a large developer community
To gain mainstream adoption, it is important to attract the attention
of a large and appropriate audience. It is easy for good designs to
fade into obscurity for targeting too small of an audience or the
wrong audience. The JDM standard is more likely to take root and
grow by providing an established community of application devel-
opers programmatic access to data mining functionality, enabling
them to extract knowledge and insight from data.
As of 2006, it is estimated there are millions of Java developers
worldwide. Java™ and J2EE are natural choices for application
development. With Java's powerful language concepts and J2EE's
distributed application framework, Java offers a major application
development framework as used in research and industry. Tactically,
Java is a natural choice of language.

Strategic Objective 2: Be a standard interface
Proprietary interfaces rarely stand the test of time. The products
that provide them or the companies that create them may come and
go. Developing applications on such interfaces can be risky. Some de
facto standards 1 arise because of extensive adoption in the market-
place. For better or worse, de facto standards normally reflect the
perspective of the organization or company that defined them.
Standards developed by multiple vendors and consumers are likely
to address a broader set of needs. Standards provide a host of others
benefits, as detailed later in this chapter, not least of which is to give
consumers a greater sense of the maturity of the technology they are
using. By providing a standard interface, technologies such as data
mining can be more confidently deployed in business processes and
applications.
Tactically, the Java Community Process (JCP) [JCP 2005] is the nat-
ural choice for a standards body through which to become a stan-
dard interface for Java.

1 De facto standards are those that are widely used and recognized by the

industry as being standards as opposed to being approved by a standards
organization [Webopedia 2006] [BellevueLinux 2006] such as Microsoft Word
and Adobe PostScript.