Providing a standard API and integration with a database environment can reduce much of the cost associated with the latter two aspects. Data preparation, selection, and cleaning remains a looming challenge that faces databases, data warehousing, and decision support systems in general. Another important challenge is to establish and document success stories. Because of the competitive nature of businesses, much of the details of great successes of data mining remain unpublished as customers view them as trade secrets and competitive advantage matters. We need to address this serious problem.
Success stories are one of the most important ways for a technology to gain adoption.
This will be a tricky challenge for our field. I remain hopeful that a good solution will emerge. He received the 1994 NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal and the JPL 1993 Lew Allen Award for Excellence in Research for his work on developing data mining systems to solve challenging science analysis problems in astronomy and remote sensing. He was also affiliated with JPL as a Distinguished Visiting Scientist.