Wednesday, August 15, 2007

KDNuggets Poll on "Data Mining" as a term

KDNuggets has a new poll on whether or not "data mining" should still be used to describe the kind of analysis we all know and love. It is still barely winning, but interesting, Knowledge Discovery is almost beating it out as the better term.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I voted for "Knowledge Discovery" in this poll.

I read somewhere where the mining analogy breaks down for some kinds of mining, e.g., where the treasure is scarce (the "nugget") and the other material is not ("plain rock").

This argument, of course, is that data mining is like this kind of mining ("scarce treasure in dross material"), but the name is wrong since "data miners" mine for insight (potential knowledge)--not data.

In other kinds of mining (coal, oil?), only the scope of the problem may change. The treasure is plentiful (where it is), but you still have to find it midst all those acres.

Van Scott