The document discusses data mining and knowledge discovery from large datasets. It begins by defining the hierarchy from data to wisdom. It then discusses the growth of big data from various sources and the need for data mining to extract useful knowledge. Data mining involves applying machine learning, statistics, visualization and database techniques to discover patterns in large datasets. The knowledge discovery process involves data cleaning, transformation, data mining and evaluating/interpreting patterns. The document provides examples of data mining applications in business, fraud detection, text mining and web mining.