The document discusses data mining and knowledge discovery from large data sets. It begins by defining the terms data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. It then explains that the growth of data from various sources has created a need for data mining to extract useful knowledge from large data repositories. Data mining involves non-trivial analysis of implicit patterns in large data sets. It is an interdisciplinary field that draws from areas like machine learning, statistics, database technology, and visualization. The goal is to transform data into actionable information through an iterative process of identifying problems, mining data, acting on results, and measuring impact.