1. Adding value to data

We're going to look at the emergence of data mining, a field that is both technological and scientific.

The use of data to extract knowledge is a constant preoccupation for human beings, as it is an essential condition for their evolution. Man has always memorized information on different media, enabling him to infer laws. Biology, physics, chemistry and sociology, to name but a few disciplines, make extensive use of the empirical approach to discover laws and/or highlight structuring elements in populations. Statistics has become a science whose purpose is to provide a rigorous framework for the empirical approach. It is within statistics and the field of databases that data mining has drawn a large part of its tools.

If they haven't already done so, historians of science are sure to come up with numerous theories to better situate data...