Re: searching the net

From: Will Dwinnell (predictr_at_bellatlantic.net)
Date: 01/24/04 

Date: 24 Jan 2004 03:43:24 -0800

David <None@hotmail.com> wrote:
"Anyway I keep reading in many of my scifi books how the person is at
their computer and they have their programs out on the net looking for
what they really need. I guess it would be called data mining."

No, "data mining", also called "knowledge discovery in databases", is
more of a statistical process. Please see definitions of "data
mining", such as:

http://www.hyperdictionary.com/computing/data+mining
http://www.bartleby.com/59/23/datamining.html
http://www.oracle.com/ip/dm_definition.html

Before the term became totally misused, what you're describing would
have been called an "intelligent agent". These days, everything is an
"agent".

-Will Dwinnell
http://will.dwinnell.com