The practice of sifting through large quantities of data, often in a database, to identify and make use of the patterns and details that emerge.

For example, consumer goods corporations mine the data generated by frequent shopper cards in order to better target advertisements. The company Google mines the data generated by the searches it performs to more accurately perform subsequent searches and to effectively target the advertisements that are alongside. Scientists mine the data generated by large-scale surveys of natural phenomena, whether astronomical observations or genetic codes.

Depending on the sort of data being mined, privacy issues can become a very real and important concern.

Other resources:

• Wikipedia article on data mining
• Wikipedia article on data mining standards
• Article “What is Data mining?"
• PDF of US Legislature report on data mining
• Article “The Policy Tools of Securitization: Data Mining, EU Foreign and Interior Policies”
• Report from the Sixth International Conference on Data Mining-Copyright