With the advent of technology, information is available in abundance on the World Wide Web. In order to have appropriate and useful information users must increasingly use techniques and automated tools to search, extract, filter, analyze and evaluate desired information and resources. Data mining can be defined as the extraction of implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful information from large databases. On the other hand, text mining is the process of extracting the information from an unstructured text. A standard text mining approach will involve categorization of text, text clustering, and extraction of concepts, granular taxonomies production, sentiment analysis, document summarization, and modeling (Fan et al, 2006). Furthermore, Web mining is the discovery and analysis of useful information using the World Wide Web (Berry, 2002; Mobasher, 2007). This broad definition encompasses “web content mining,” the automated search for resources and retrieval of information from millions of websites and online databases, as well as “web usage mining,” the discovery and analysis of users’ website navigation and online service access patterns. Companies are investing significant amounts of time and money on creating, developing, and enhancing individualized customer relationship, a process called customer relationship management or CRM. Based on a report by the Aberdeen Group, worldwide CRM spending reached close to $20 billion by 2006. Today, to improve the customer relationship, most companies collect and refine massive amounts of data available through the customers. To increase the value of current information resources, data mining techniques can be rapidly implemented on existing software and hardware platforms, and integrated with new products and systems (Wang et al., 2008). If implemented on high-performance client/server or parallel processing computers, data mining tools can analyze enormous databases to answer customer-centric questions such as, “Which clients have the highest likelihood of responding to my next promotional mailing, and why.” This paper provides a basic introduction to data mining and other related technologies and their applications in CRM.
Data mining software using fuzzy inference systems at the World Wide Web
