WEB VIEW: An SQL Extension for Joining Corporate Data to Data Derived from the Web

摘要

Knowledge management (KM) within an organization is often considered as a way to increase competitive ability. However, KM has not always been well received within many corporations. A Bain & Company report evaluated 25 different types of tools, of which KM tools ranked 24th in satisfaction. The report also showed how KM software has a relatively high rate of defection at 13%. The primary reasons for this are the expense, the difficulty acquiring new knowledge, and knowledge dissemination. Consequently, many researchers have advocated data mining of external data sources to supplement organizational knowledge. It has been established that programs can be written to retrieve and store data from the Web. However, development and execution of these programs are quite complicated. Large programming efforts and high maintenance costs are duplicated across corporations to achieve similar or identical results. Also, data retrieved by such techniques is static. Figure 1 depicts a programmer who collects data from the Web and stores that data into the corporate database, as opposed to ad hoc queries used inside a database to query various information in different formats depending upon the users' needs. New information that is available for the Web will be made available with these ad hoc queries instead of the static ones that are stored. Another point is that the information available outside is not stored explicidy in the database, which means new information is always available when queried. However, as with traditional database views, Structured Query Language (SQL) commands can transfer this information to a permanent storage location.