Data mining

Data Mining (DM) can be defined as a "nontrivial extraction of implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful information from data". DM is usually associated with an institution's need to identify trends and other useful patterns in a large set of data. The term data mining is sometimes used as a synonym to knowledge discovery of databases (KKD), but according to the standardized methodologies (i.e. CRISPDM); data mining is only one step in the KDD process. The process of KDD includes data understanding, data preparation, modelling (data mining step), evaluation and deployment. Data Mining technologies may e.g. be very useful in eParticipation contexts to extract and evaluate valuable knowledge of large discussion data.