In ISDN, the "data" channel.

No, it's not that really weird guy in the MIS department. Data dip is an interactive voice response (IVR) term that means looking up information in a database using caller input or other caller information. In particular it means getting information on a caller (name, address) based on his or her CLID (caller ID) by looking up his or her telephone number (that's what caller ID gives you) in a big database. This big database is often external to your company: it is one of the same databases used for list look-up services.

Data mining is the analysis of data for relationships that have not previously been discovered. In effect, what data mining does for you is allow you to explore information that's been gathered as a result of long stretches of normal business operation, years or even decades, and discover things about your customers and products that you didn't know before. You might, for example, learn things from a close look at correlations between calling patterns and customer buying histories. Data mining is not something that goes on in call centers. However, call center data is a mother lode of information for data mining research.

If a data mine is the place where information resides in its rawest, ugliest, least analyzed state, and a data warehouse is where it lives once it's analyzed, what's a data reservoir? The ready...