“Data mining is the process of extracting or deriving patterns from large quantities of data.”
- Internet, the
It combines methods from statistics and artificial intelligence along with database management. Data mining is an increasingly important tool for modern businesses to transform data into ‘business intelligence’, thereby providing an informational advantage. It is currently used in a wide range of profiling practices, such as marketing, surveillance, fraud detection, and scientific discovery.
The ‘Social’ aspect of data-mining involves the use and analysis of publicly available/open data to derive patterns in order to offer a certain opinion or point-of-view. The information serves to back-up this opinion.
This information is then spread across the internet through news, blogs, websites, etc. Anyone can draw their own patterns and observations from the data, comment on them, and debate the conclusions. At its very core, social data-mining involves the sharing of such data.
‘Data journalism’ is a prime example of social data-mining. It is a field that is growing constantly and gaining recognition by the day. Data journalists use such publicly available data, especially data made available by governments, to draw some startling conclusions. These are published over the internet and attract significant attention.
Similarly, Datawunder hopes to enable users to accomplish the same i.e. extracting patterns and drawing conclusions, while sharing this information in the cloud.
