Overview

The thirst for knowledge is an innate human characteristic.

Aristotle

People have been recording and extracting knowledge from data since the beginning of time. The cave drawings of Arles, the cuneiform tablets documenting shipboard loading manifests of ancient Babylon, and the Rosetta Stone are examples of the defining human characteristic to make sense of the world through data constructs recorded in symbolic frequently numeric form. The cave drawings capture the experience of the day the life and death dramas of the hunt, the harvest, the feasting, and the fertility; the cuneiform tablets record the minutiae of early trade counting the weight, cut, and number of precious stones or the number and volume of amphorae filled with olive oil; and the Rosetta Stone provides a key to Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Everywhere and always people reflect and record their reality in data laid down in various recording media. The earliest data miners reconstructed life styles from cave drawings so as to describe and predict human activity in those circumstances. They could describe and predict trading patterns and the effect of variables on the olive tree harvest in the ancient Mediterranean Sea area. Indeed, even today archeologists and anthropologists can infer effects on current-day trading patterns based on early trading models built from examining the data contained in these and other tablets. These tablets, of course, are little tables the precursors of modern database systems.

So data mining has its roots in one of the oldest of human activities: the desire to summarize experience in some numeric or...