We have described the substantial technical challenges in
developing and deploying decision support systems. While
many commercial products and services exist, there are still
several interesting avenues for research. We will only touch
on a few of these here.
Data cleaning is a problem that is reminiscent of
heterogeneous data integration, a problem that has been
studied for many years. But here the emphasis is on data
inconsistencies instead of schema inconsistencies. Data
cleaning, as we indicated, is also closely related to data
mining, with the objective of suggesting possible
inconsistencies.