Perspective Wall Technique for Visualizing and Interpreting Medical Data

2. Theoretical Background

Traditional decision-support tools (e.g., OLAP, Info-center, dashboard, ERP) leave the initiative for the users to choose the elements that they want to observe or analyze. In Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) (Fayyad et al., 1996; Hand & Mannila, 2001), the system often takes the initiative to discover the connections between the data elements. It is then possible, to a certain extent, to predict the future based on the past. The goal of the KDD is to be able to extract data elements, in other words, knowledge. We can also say that we try to “[extract] new, useful, and valid knowledge from a mass of data” (Fayyad et al., 1996).