9th July 1998

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It has been announced that the University of Ulster has won funding from the European Union for an innovative research project called MIMIC. The project, worth over £300,000 begins in July 1998.

MIMIC, which stands for 'Mining the Internet for Marketing IntelligenCe' is a collaborative project with ISL (UK), the University of Ulster, and web-site providers Adnet from Dublin (Ireland), and At Internet from Bordeaux (France).

"This is the first electronic commerce project funded by the European Commission to begin in Northern Ireland," says Professor John Hughes of the University of Ulster. "It highlights the fact that the University of Ulster is carrying out leading edge research in electronic commerce, which builds upon our established expertise in database and artificial intelligence research."

ISL currently make the Clementine data mining product, used by marketers worldwide to analyse large data sets. MIMIC will provide an Internet version of the Clementine software, enabling companies selling on the Internet to gauge their customers needs more consistently.

We want to bring the subtlety and power of modern marketing technology into the exciting new domain of the world wide web, says Maurice Mulvenna of the University of Ulster. To supplement the data mining functionality already available in Clementine, new facilities for automatically decoding web-log data will be developed.

The new tool will also be web-enabled, allowing long-distance data mining via an Internet browser. The route a user takes when browsing a web-site is logged and stored. Increasingly, users can also be tracked over repeated visits via Internet cookies. By analysing this information with data mining techniques, it is hoped that hosts will be able to improve the design and functionality of their web sites.

To date, we don't have a very adequate data model for web-log information, said Alan Montgomery of ISL. With MIMIC, one of the most important objectives is to discover the kind of information that is available, and what it can tell us about how web-sites are used.

Any organisation or individual interested in further information on MIMIC can email the project co-ordinators in the University (Maurice Mulvenna MD.Mulvenna@ulst.ac.uk, or Alex Buchner AG.Buchner@ulst.ac.uk)

For further information, please contact:

Press Office Department of Communication and Development
Telephone: 028 9036 6178
Email: pressoffice@ulster.ac.uk