Data mining

Data mining is the principle of sorting through large amounts of data and picking out relevant information. It is usually used by business intelligence organizations, and financial analysts, but it is increasingly used in the sciences to extract information from the enormous data sets generated by modern experimental and observational methods. It has been described as "the nontrivial extraction of implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful information from data" and "the science of extracting useful information from large data sets or databases"
Although the term "data mining" is usually used in relation to analysis of data, like artificial intelligence, it is an umbrella term with varied meanings in a wide range of contexts.

A promising application of Knowledge discovery is in the area of software modernization which involves understanding existing software artifacts. Usually the knowledge obtained from existing software is presented in the form of models to which specific queries can be made when necessary. An entity-relationship model is a common way to represent knowledge obtained from existing software. The Object Management Group (OMG) developed the Knowledge Discovery Metamodel (KDM), which defines an ontology for software assets and their relationships, for the purpose of performing knowledge discovery of existing code. Knowledge discovery from existing software systems, also known as software mining is closely related to data mining, since existing software artifacts contain enormous business value, key for the evolution of software systems. Knowledge Discovery from software systems addresses structure and behavior as well as the data processed by the software system. Instead of mining individual data sets, software mining focuses on metadata, such as database schema. The OMG Knowledge Discovery Metamodel provides an integrated representation for capturing application metadata as part of a holistic existing system metamodel. Another OMG specification, the Common Warehouse Metamodel focuses entirely on mining enterprise metadata