The document discusses data mining and knowledge discovery from large data sets. It begins by defining the terms data, information, knowledge, and wisdom in a hierarchy. It then discusses why data mining is needed due to the explosive growth of data from various sources. Data mining is defined as the non-trivial extraction of implicit and potentially useful knowledge from large data sets. The knowledge discovery process involves identifying a problem, mining data to transform it into actionable information, acting on the information, and measuring the results. The document outlines different types of data that can be mined, including structured, transactional, time-series, spatial, multimedia, and web data. Common data mining tasks are also described such as classification, prediction, clustering,