Urgent --Your Input Needed

On: DATA REFINING and DATA MINING

Dear Reader:

To improve BYTE's coverage of technology in the State of the Art section, we'd like to get your feedback about what topics, areas, and products we should be considering, and in what ways. Specifically, we're planning to cover data refining, or what some call data mining. This will involve looking at not only the manipulation and presentation of data through SQL or other products but also at the process of examining your data carefully, discovering new relationships, and extracting the most information from that data. So we need to know what your requirements in this area are, what products and services you'd like to see available, and maybe even some tips on people we should be talking to--users, vendors, researchers--you tell us!

Also, we're using a new method to capture your comments and suggestions so that we can use them more easily in the future, not just as a one-shot item. To let us know what you think, please use the following as a template to send us, via E-mail, an ASCII text file with your comments. Please be sure to include the `` '' with their angle brackets, followed by your information and comments. And thanks very much for your help.

Please E-mail the completed form to: editors@bix.com

Data Refining

Jones

Cadwallader

Technical Director

ABC Industries

800-555-1234

cadjones@host.domain

This is where your comments go. Be as brief or as long as you want. Tell us what you think, what you need, what you want to know more about. Tell us who we should be talking to about this.