Question 1. A building maintenance company has installed a decision support system to support various activities of this building maintenance company and its customers. Part of the decision support system of this building maintenance company is an expert system to provide information and advice to customers that wish to renovate their buildings. The database of this building maintenance company contains the costing for building renovation and maintenance of all buildings completed by this company in the past ten years.

1.1 Describe the data and knowledge that is required for this expert system to assist customers in their building renovations. Provide an example to clarify your answer. 

1.2 A data warehouse is created as part of the decision support system of this building maintenance company. This data warehouse contains all data collect by this company in the past ten years about renovation cost and time taken to renovate a building based on the required renovation work for each building that is renovated by this company. Explain how the data stored in this data warehouse of the decision support system of this building maintenance company can assist this company to provide time estimation to complete required renovations for its customers?

1.3 Describe the importance of data quality for the data stored in a data warehouse of this company.

Question 2. A university stores its student enrolment data in its student database and its staff performance data in its staff database. The university housing database has a database that contains data about student housing and the maintenance of the students housing buildings of this university. All databases are separate and unintegrated in this university. This university has purchased a decision support system to assist in its decision making about its student, staff and all its student housing and building maintenance. The university intends to use data visualization and data mining to assist the university in its decision making about student, staff and its building maintenance.

2.1 Explain problems that can occur in obtaining data from different university databases to support complex decisions relating to the university student, staff and its student housing and building maintenance. Provide an example to clarify your answer.

2.2 This university intends to create a data warehouse to store all its student, staff and its student housing and building maintenance data in that data warehouse. Explain how a data warehouse containing such data can assist the university in its decision making and data visualization about student, staff and its student housing and building maintenance as well as monitoring of university staff performance.

2.3 Should this university purchase a data extraction transformation and loading tool for extraction, transformation and loading of its data from different university databases into its data warehouse. Explain two issues that needs to be considered when purchasing a data extraction transformation and loading tool.

2.4 Prepare a diagram that shows how the university decision support system will be distributed to all its users. Explain how OLAP can be utilized effectively by the university.

Question 3. A supermarket chain has purchased and installed a decision support system for product ordering, budget preparation and expense monitoring. This supermarket has twenty stores in Australia. Each store has product ordering, budget preparation and expense monitoring sections.

3.1 Discuss how creation of a data warehouse for this supermarket can assist data mining for this supermarket chain. Explain how data mining can assist in product ordering, budget preparation and expense monitoring for this supermarket chain. Give examples to clarify your answer for use of data mining in product ordering, budget preparation and expense monitoring.

3.2 Describe two issues related to the use of data transformation tools (i.e. Extraction Transformation Loading software (ETL)) for transferring data from each supermarket to the data warehouse of this supermarket chain. 

Question 4. A hotel chain has installed a decision support system (DSS) to support various activities of all its hotels. Part of the decision support system of this hotel chain is an intelligent agent system to provide information and advice on different hotel facilities such as rooms facilities, sport facilities and restaurant facilities at each hotel of this hotel chain.

4.1 The hotel chain intends to use an intelligent agent system with its decision support system to assist customers in booking hotel rooms based on their required hotel facilities such as room, sport and restaurant facilities in each hotel. Describe what data needs to be stored in the database and data warehouse of the decision support system of this hotel chain so that this intelligent agent system can perform its required tasks as described above.

4.2 Describe two benefits of using an intelligent agent system to search the website of other hotels and provide information about hotel room, sport and restaurant facilities and room prices in other hotels that are in close proximity to the hotels of this hotel chain. 

4.3 How can such data collected by an intelligent agent system assist in making this hotel more competitive in terms of room, sport and restaurant facilities and its room pricing? (Provide an example to clarify your answer)