Developing a Sustainable Development Indicator via Knowledge Mining

SUMMARY

This paper exposes the concealed sustainability information in the annual reports for the United Nations Development Programme. As an alternative to the ‘understanding the database by computer’ approach, we focus on the meaning of the database by using the so-called ‘understanding the database by human’ approach. The discernability matrix in rough set is used to obtain a qualitative description of the database. Special domain knowledge is embedded in the discernability matrix, and an attribute reduction set is employed to develop a sustainable development indicator. A complete assessment of the world's sustainability is thus provided.

Key words:

• Knowledge discovery in the database
• rough set
• human development
• sustainability indicator