On Wed, 5 Jun 2002, Bob Miller wrote: > > What is the application domain? What kinds of analysis do you want > to do? If we knew that we might make better suggestions.
Long term, data-analysis, in the sense of extracting meaningful information from piles of data and presenting it in a useful form to as broad as possible an audience is the application domain. Near term, I have a historical data set stretching back 10 years (for some of the subsidiary data sets) that includes geographical, financial, usage, and other forms of data that I would like to be able to mine for useful information, additionally I would like to be able to compile weekly usage and business advantage reports from the ongoing data collection and I would like to integrate existing public domain data sets that could illuminate and contextualize the data on hand. So specifically: maps of dsl customers, dsl availability, line condition reports, color coded by vendor and quality. Maps of visitors to some websites/URLs generated by ip-tracing tools maps of dialup usage, including trouble reports Time series plots of network usage, by link and vendor, including bandwidth usage Time series projections of resource usage including historical data about usage effectiveness Basically trying to string together an ERP/ERM/CRM system out of baling wire, duct-tape and good intentions (also this super-secret GPL software fu) Right now I'm at the big end of the funnel on this, I know that lots of people get fancy college degrees and earn six figure salaries for doing just little bits of all the pieces mentioned above, but there seems to be a dearth of high quality packages that are: free as in water (i'm cheap, site licenses for SAS aren't :p) free as in thought (there are giants, i'm a dwarf, shoulders..) unified ( switching languages every 10 minutes is not productive) I'm basically looking to assemble an environment where I can take as much advantage of public statistical and analytical tools as possible, and one of the things, I'd like to focus on most is putting that power into the hands of as many people as possible through my connections at OPN/EFN by sussing out what works and what doesn't and tying it up in an easy to use and learn package. > > -- > Bob Miller K<bob> > kbobsoft software consulting > http://kbobsoft.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://www.efn.org/~laprice ( Community, Cooperation, Consensus http://www.opn.org ( Openness to serendipity, make mistakes http://www.efn.org/~laprice/poems ( but learn from them.(carpe fructus ludi)
