  We show that the e-commerce domain can provide all the right ingredients for
successful data mining and claim that it is a killer domain for data mining. We
describe an integrated architecture, based on our expe-rience at Blue Martini
Software, for supporting this integration. The architecture can dramatically
reduce the pre-processing, cleaning, and data understanding effort often
documented to take 80% of the time in knowledge discovery projects. We
emphasize the need for data collection at the application server layer (not the
web server) in order to support logging of data and metadata that is essential
to the discovery process. We describe the data transformation bridges required
from the transaction processing systems and customer event streams (e.g.,
clickstreams) to the data warehouse. We detail the mining workbench, which
needs to provide multiple views of the data through reporting, data mining
algorithms, visualization, and OLAP. We con-clude with a set of challenges.
