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 explains that the growth of data from various sources has created a need for data mining to extract useful knowledge from large data repositories. The key aspects of data mining discussed are that it aims to discover previously unknown, implicit and potentially useful patterns from large data sets in an automated manner. The document outlines the interdisciplinary nature of data mining and its relationship to knowledge discovery in databases. It describes the types of data that can be mined, including structured, transactional, time-series and web data, as well as common data mining tasks like classification, prediction and clustering.