Note: Many topics at this site are reduced versions of the text in "The Encyclopedia of Networking and Telecommunications." Search results will not be as extensive as a search of the book's CD-ROM.

Data mining is about finding new information within existing data. Patterns, relationships, correlations, and dependencies are located by analyzing data using a variety of tools and techniques. Data mining has grown in popularity as computers and software have become available to handle the task.

Large amounts of data from a variety of sources are usually analyzed in this way. An organization might be able to extract new data out of its existing data by correlating it to a database obtained from some other source. For example, a customer database might provide new information if combined with a database from another source that contains additional information about those same customers. Mining may bring out unseen information beyond the basic relationships of the combined data. But data mining's potential goes beyond customer databases. Scientific databases are a prime candidate. For example, geological information can be "mined" to find potential mineral and oil sites! See "Portal" for related information.

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