A Framework for Logic based Information Integration and Knowledge Discovery for Prospect Prediction and Rating

iWave Information Systems Inc. is a private company based in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canadathat provides detailed and timely fundraising information to the nonprofit sector. iWave has provided prospectresearch resources to fundraising professionals for over 20 years and developed a web-based Prospect ResearchOnline (PRO) system in 1996, which has been supporting iWave's growth tremendously, expanding throughthe United States, Canada, and overseas. However, the current PRO product is basically an operationalinformation access system, which is lacking logic mechanism for information integration, and has no dataanalysis structure and functionalities, in particular for knowledge discovery. These weaknesses have becomeobstacles for improving PRO's performance to assist clients to quickly identify propensity affinity and capacityof their prospects. From the user point of view, the problem with the current PRO product is that the amount oftime and effort required by researchers (3,000 around the world) to analyze and assess iWave's data has reacheda critical point for retaining its competitive edge internationally. The product system must be evolved quicklyby equipping 1) strong logic based information integration technologies to provide unified and transparentaccess to iWave's autonomous and heterogeneous data sources, and 2) advanced data analysis/modeling toolsby applying/developing data mining functionalities, as well knowledge based indexing to significantly improveiWave's PRO system. The objective of this research is to transforming iWaves operational source data intoanalytical information and predictive knowledge for quickly identifying propensity affinity and capacity of theirprospcts. The calculated values, in theory, will reduce the clients need to manually assess each prospect recordfrom each of the datasets. With iWave's limited R&D capabilities, this NSERC Engagement project wouldprovide a big help to leverage the expertise of Dalhousie FCS to get a start.