Workshops

The growth in the amount of available databases far outstrips the growth of corresponding knowledge. This creates both a need and an opportunity for extracting knowledge from databases. Many recent results have been reported on extracting different kinds of knowledge from databases, including diagnostic rules, drug side effects, classes of stars, rules for expert systems, and rules for semantic query optimization. The importance of this topic is now recognized by leading researchers. Michie predicts that "The next area that is going to explode is the use of machine learning tools as a component of large scale data analysis'' (AI Week, March 15, 1990).