Data Mining

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Analogue

It is always nice to use an analogue to gain an immidiate understanding of the subject. But it can only give a good understanding if the analogue is used properly.

Gold Mining

Obviously the analogue is with gold mining (or the mining for some other precious material). Gold mining is the collection of ore from a mine and the extraction of gold from this ore.

So, what is the ore and what is the gold in our process?
Actually, the data is the ore. But we do not have to collect it, we already have it.

Information

The gold in the analogue is information in our process. We want to extract information from the data.

Information Extraction

So it should not be called data mining but information extraction or information mining if we want to refer to the whole process of collecting data and extracting information from it.