Software Software IBM is the leader in patenting software-related technology. Over 3,500 patents for software technologies issued to IBM in the 5-year period from 1996 to 2000 alone. A significant portion of the portfolio, with over 2,000 active patents, is in the area of data handling technologies, or how a computer can be programmed to manage data, to analyze it or to convert data to other forms. This covers technologies such as database management, image processing, compression and decompression for Internet transmission, software security, speech recognition and processing, and text processing and translation. IBM also has a rapidly growing patent portfolio covering new multimedia technologies involving video servers, digital signal processing, digital audio and video technologies, industry specific services, applications and solutions.
Data mining is one emerging area of data handling.
Data mining is concerned with the analysis of the huge amounts of data accumulated from the millions of transactions and interactions over the Internet and other networks. IBM holds a number of pioneer patents in data mining that have proved useful for understanding consumer purchasing tendencies, for fraud detection, and even for medical uses. The invention is used to determine what portions of the data need to be subject to data mining algorithms and what can be omitted, and for this reason, is particularly useful for handling data with too many attributes to be handled by normal data mining algorithms. Having User Feedback Mechanism for Monitoring Performance of Mining Tasks , shows a data mining system that provides user feedback on the quality measure of the data mining application while it is in progress. The point of the invention is that some data mining tasks can take many hours to run in real time.