Data mining will become much more important. Your bank will know everything you've bought. Companies will throw away nothing they know about their customers because it will be so valuable. If you're not doing this, you're out of business. Indeed, those of us who strongly believe in the growing importance of this area and the increasing need for data reduction and analysis tools are hardly surprised.
Data collections continue to grow, seemingly out of control.
Most organizations are doing little to extract useful knowledge from the growing mountains of data. There is a huge opportunity for data mining and other data reduction techniques to add tremendous value. This is the opportunity for people working in our new but growing field. Given the competitive pressures on organizations to become more efficient and more responsive, it is not difficult to see that much remains to be achieved. Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro, then a researcher at GTE Laboratories in Waltham, MA, wanted to hold a workshop about Knowledge Discovery in Databases .