From the Editor

Welcome to this issue of The Data Profiler. I want to thank all of our readers and visitors and hope you continue to find our articles useful to your projects and jobs.

In this issue, we continue our series of Structural Inference techniques with an article on finding and normalizing embedded tables in source data. Structural inference is a long-neglected area of data profiling. With these techniques, perhaps practitioners will start looking at the significant benefits that can be achieved from this task.

We also introduce the concepts of Domain Studies and what information is obtained from this profiling task. This may also turn into a series of articles, especially if our readers contribute articles on their techniques and efforts.

Finally, The Data Profiler has a Special Report on the Enterprise Data Forum held in November, 2002. About 300 data management professionals gathered in Pittsburgh, PA to attend seminars and talks discussing subjects like XML, Very Large Database (VLDB) techniques, data modeling, and data integration. Our report focuses on the data profiling seminar given by Michael Scofield, as well as discussions on the Capability Maturity Model for data and the Semantic Web.

As always, we welcome submissions from our readers on how they are applying data profiling to their projects and efforts. Also, let us know if the articles presented are helpful, or if you want a particular topic covered. Submit feedback about the website and/or any particular articles, as well.

I hope you enjoy this issue of The Data Profiler.

Joseph Novella, Editor