Launch by the French Ambassador of the first Data Warehousing and Data Mining Workshop in Pakistan

Islamabad, February 20, 2007)

“Pakistan

Scientific and Technological Information Centre (PASTIC) and Pakistan Science

Foundation (PSF), Ministry of Science & Technology has organized a two days

workshop on Data Warehousing and Data Mining from 20-21 February, 2007 in

collaboration with French Embassy under a French Project (EXPEDO-France). The

workshop was inaugurated by H.E. Regis de Belenet French Ambassador to Pakistan.

Federal Minister for Science & Technology Ch. Nouraiz Shakoor Khan presided

the function and three French Professors lead by Prof. Dominique Laurent

delivered their informative and elaborative lectures on Data Warehousing and

Data Mining..

This

is the first workshop of this nature in Pakistan as the Data Warehousing Data

Mining is the emerging area of information technology and has recently been

introduced in Pakistan. Pakistan Scientific and Technological Information Centre

(PASTIC) and Pakistan Science Foundation (PSF) have taken the initiative of

organizing this important workshop in Pakistan which is joint venture of PASTIC

and EXPEDO-France. This is a good example of partnership between Pakistan and

France in the scientific field.

In

his speech, the French Ambassador to Pakistan, H.E. Regis de Belenet praised the

organization of the workshop on such an important topic and expressed hope for

future scientific partnership between

France and Pakistan. The Ambassador exposed his views that storing an exponentially increased volume of data without having the

right tools to exploit them was nowadays definitely useless. Standard computing

tools, such as Database Management Systems, are not appropriate anymore in many

respects : they do not fit the actual users needs. Therefore the newly

introduced techniques, most of them being borrowed from the Artificial

Intelligence and the Database research, will prove very useful.

Federal

Minister for Science and Technology Ch. Nouraiz Shakoor Khan emphasized on

application of Data Warehousing and Data Mining in the field of health,

business, banking and agriculture as the techniques of Data Mining are useful

for enhancing the business of the organization and enterprises. He said the

Government of Pakistan fully supports this useful initiative. He also expressed

the hope that the cooperation with France will be further strengthened and will

be a foundation for many future joint ventures in different scientific

programmes.

Data

mining is an interdisciplinary field, a combination of mathematics, computer

science, Information Technology, business and marketing. It is particularly

useful to companies with a strong costumer focus, e.g., retail, financial,

communication, packaged goods industries. Its applications can enable companies

to determine the impact on sales, customer satisfaction, and corporate profits

and to optimise marketing strategies for better return on investment.

Data

Mining is also emerging as one of the key features of many homeland security

initiatives. Often used as a mean for detecting fraud, assessing risk, data

mining involves the use of data analysis tools to discover previously unknown,

valid patterns and relationships in large data sets../.