Your Proposal for SIGUCCS XXIV

Name: Rekha Shankar

Title: Information Technology Associate

Institution: University Of Maryland University College

Address: University Blvd at Adelphi Rd

City: College Park

State: MD

Zip: 20742

Office Phone: 301-985-7400

FAX: 301-985-7860

E-mail Address: rshankar@nova.umuc.edu

URL (Personal Page):

Suggested Title of Presentation: Data Mining At the Help Desk

Appropriate Format: Paper Presentation

Suggested Audience: People In Information Technology

Presentation Outcome:

1. Adavntages of Creating a Web Page

2. Concept of Data Mining

3.

Presentation Materials:

1. The Source code used to create the web page.

2.

3.

Presentation Content:

	The University of Maryland University College Computer Help Desk staff supports a user community of 800+. In order to provide convenient access to problem solving information, the staff decided to create a Help Desk website. The Web page will provide a search engine where users can input key words and search the database for possible solutions to their software and hardware problems. The website will also offer a question box where users may query the Help Desk staff via electronic mail.
	
	One of the many problems the staff has encountered is that UMUC's Unix server does not support Common Gateway Interface(CGI), a standard for interfacing external applications like relational databases with information servers such as Web servers. Purchasing an off-the-shelf Expert system would be too costly and would cause compatibility problems. Because of this, UMUC decided to create a page with links between related data. For example, users may access the hardware link to go to a page containing information relating to their particular problem.

	This project will invole creating creating forms and tables and categorizing them by information type. The creation of the Help Desk website will allow users to search for solutions to their problems before calling the Help Desk staff for help.