Data Mining and OLAP

Microsoft Corp. is using data mining techniques from Digital Resolve Inc. in its Internet browsers to guard against so-called phishing attacks, in which dubious Web sites try to harvest personal information from unknowing victims. The technology focuses heavily on the Web sites of financial companies and e-commerce sites. It looks at 39 characteristics of a site, including IP address, location, domain and the Internet service provider, said Dennis Maicon, Digital Resolve's vice president for financial services solutions. It also checks how long a particular domain is valid based on its registration information.

Many organizations analyze their business-critaical data using OLAP technology. "OLAP-based data mining provides a way to query multidimensional data sets and drill down into the data to find patterns". Microsoft Office Web Components enable Web-based OLAP reporting. This includes PivotTable and Chart components that can be embedded in a Web page and scripted by many programmers.