Design of the JDM API - Java Data Mining: Strategy, Standard, and Practice - page 167

Chapter
8
Design of the JDM API
Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add,
but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Designing a vendor-neutral standard application programming
interface (API) involves many constructive altercations to find a
common ground where all participants can agree on the standard.
Despite being widely used across many industries to solve business
problems, there previously was no data mining standard for Java
that allowed applications to include data mining solutions that are
portable across multiple data mining engines (DMEs). With the
advent of the Java Data Mining (JDM) standard, application develop-
ers can more easily use portable data mining functionality.
One of the challenges in designing a standard data mining API is
that DME capabilities differ significantly from one another. Even
though many of the data mining techniques and algorithms are pub-
lic and standardized, vendors differentiate themselves by improving
performance, automating settings selection, or specializing algo-
rithms for a particular domain or need.
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