Concept

A concept in MiningMart represents an everyday notion for which there exists data in the database. For example, as mentioned earlier, a concept ``Customer'' may exist in MiningMart and refer to one or more tables in the database that contain data about customers. Concepts have features which define them. The MiningMart system provides a concept editor to create, edit and delete concepts and their features. Concepts belong to the conceptual level and define the input for every step (or its operator, more precisely). Concepts are connected to ColumnSets which represent the database contents on the relational level.
There are two types of concepts: DB and MINING. The first type are concepts whose data exists before any MiningMart step is executed. That is, these concepts represent the input data for the case. All MINING}concepts, in contrast, are not connected to any data before the execution (called compilation) of a MiningMart step. The MiningMart compiler creates the data that belongs to the MINING concepts and connects it to them. See also under compiler and connection.