Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
The knowledge base provides foundations and methodologies for research
(and development) activities. Prior DM research and development and re-
sults from reference disciplines (statistics, machine learning, AI, etc.) provide
foundational theories, frameworks, models, methods, techniques and their in-
stantiations used in the develop/build phase of research. Methodologies should
provide guidelines and techniques for the justify/evaluate phase. Rigor is
achieved by appropriately applying existing foundations and methodologies.
5 Discussion and Conclusions
In this chapter we first considered several existing frameworks for DM and
their advantages and limitations. Second, we considered a traditional IS frame-
work and two subframeworks: one for the IS user environment and another
for the IS development environment. Based on these two we suggested our
new research framework for DM. It imports research questions and topics
from the IS discipline into the DM area trying to take benefit of the fact that
the long developed IS discipline can help the maturing DM research area to
raise the relevance of its research and thus its practical importance for people,
organizations, and their surroundings.
Figure 11a presents our understanding of the current situation with DM
research. The left triangle presents the current DM practice situation where
almost merely the relevance aspects, i.e. utility are dominating. The right
triangle presents the current DM research situation that is heavily dominated
by rigor aspects and almost no attention is paid to DM research relevance. The
lower arrow between DM research and practice is solid because some amount of
rigor DM research results are flowing to the practice at least through software
applications. The upper arrow is dashed because our understanding of the
situation is that too seldom DM research takes practice related aspects into
Relevance
Relevance
Relevance
R & R
Rigor
Rigor
Rigor
DM Practice
DM Research
DM Research that does include
relevance issues
(a)
Current disbalance in DM research
(b)
Balanced DM research
Fig. 11.
Rigor and relevance aspects of DM research
