InforSense

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InforSense is a private data analysis software company based in London, UK. It was founded in 1999 as a spin-off of Imperial College London to commercialize their research in High Performance Computing, Visual programming and large-scale Data mining. (Chattratichat, Guo & Syed 1999) (Alsairafi et al. 2003)

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[edit] Company

InforSense was founded in November 1999 by Professor Yike Guo and his students to commercialize his group's Open Discovery Workflow technology for high-performance and large-scale data analysis, rapid application building and process knowledge management. InforSense used Imperial's Business incubator, Imperial Innovations, which retains an interest in the company. Prof. Guo is an authority on Data mining and Grid computing and serves as Technical Director of the Parallel Computing Centre and Head of the Data Mining Group at Imperial College.

[edit] Software

InforSense's main product, the InforSense Platform (formerly called KDE, the Kensington Discovery Edition or Knowledge Discovery Environment), uses a dataflow Visual programming interface to let non-programmers develop applications. Instead of writing script language programs or clicking GUI icons, they drag and drop executable icons or "nodes" representing data sources and analysis operations into a diagram called a "workflow", connect them together, and iteratively execute and modify each section of the diagram to test the result. Then they "publish" the workflow to a Web "portal" application that a larger number of people may use.

The workflow editor is a client, and workflows always execute on a server that may reside on the same computer, a remote server or a grid. For large data, optimizations for database systems such as Oracle Database permit most execution to actually occur within the database.

There are also several collections of specialized InforSense nodes for specific applications such as Genome-wide association study (GenSense), clinical trials and databases (ClinicalSense) and drug screening (ChemSense).

InforSense workflow software is often used in combination with software and hardware from other technology companies who are members of InforSense's "Open Workflow Partner Network".

The InforSense workflow development environment can also be considered as a Rapid application development system.

The workflow editing environment is also a form of knowledge capture and corporate Best Practices documentation.

[edit] External links

[edit] References

Alsairafi, Salman; Emmanouil, Filippia-Sofia; Ghanem, Moustafa; Giannadakis, Nikolaos; Guo, Yike; Kalaitzopoulos, Dimitrios; Osmond, Michelle; Rowe, Anthony; et al. (2003), “The Design of Discovery Net: Towards Open Grid Services for Knowledge Discovery”, Int. J. High Perform. Comput. Appl. (Sage Publications, Inc.) 17 (3): 297--315, ISSN 1094-3420, DOI 10.1177/1094342003173003 

Chattratichat, Jaturon; Guo, Yike & Syed, Jameel (1999), A Visual Language for Internet-Based Data Mining and Data Visualization, IEEE Computer Society, pp. 64, ISBN 0-7695-0216-4