Enhancing Government Decision Making Through Knowledge Discovery from Data

A major challenge facing management in developed countries is improving the performance of knowledge and service workers, i.e. the decision makers. In a developing country such as South Africa, with a welldeveloped business sector, the need to improve the performance of decision makers, especially in government, is even more crucial. South Africa has to face many new challenges in the 21 century growing environmental concerns, massive social and economic inequalities, an ageing population, low productivity, massive unemployment and the nation's evolving role in Africa. The importance of science and technology to address these pressing issues cannot be overemphasised. This paper discussed the development of a knowledge-base to aid government decision makers in interpreting the results of the National Research and Technology (NRT) Audit that was undertaken by the South African Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology. An intelligent data analysis tool is employed to construct a knowledge-base, using a data-driven rather than a knowledge-driven approach to knowledge-base con-struction. The knowledge-base is constructed directly from the data as contained in the NRT Audit data warehouse. The rules contained in the knowledge-base are produced by a team of data mining techniques that cooperate as members of a learning system. This knowledge-base is used to augment the knowledge of the human experts. Results show that the information, as discovered during the knowledge-base construction process, either enhanced or contradicted the finding of the human experts.