Megaputer Intelligence

I had an idea that data mining had something to do with tracking users' navigation histories to figure out who was coming to a given website, where they were coming from, and what products or paths to suggest to them while they were there. But on further consideration, and after consulting Wikipedia's intimidating article, I realized I wasn't quite sure what data mining actually was. I tried consulting some of the websites of some of the companies that actually provide data-mining services; and while I still feel a little vague, that was helpful, particularly when I looked at Megaputer's site.

Megaputer Intelligence gives a rundown of the various different uses to which companies might want to put data-mining services. Even more specific are the actual solution packages they sell, which encompass survey analysis, cross-sell analysis, complaint analysis, and so on.

In addition to data mining, Megaputer also offers text mining, which it defines as a way of "[automatically] eliciting knowledge from unstructured text. . . based on a combination of linguistic, semantic, statistical and machine learning techniques." If text mining is able to "understand" or categorize a text semantically, I wondered if it might evolve into an interesting online tool for book publishers.