Modern computer technology, coupled with the availability of more and more powerful sensors, has led to impressive-sized collections of information. Having a lot of data, on one hand, undoubtedly represents an advantage; on the other hand, it is a problem. This is because it imposes obvious management problems, in the sense that more sophisticated tools will be needed to extract knowledge from it.
These pieces of data, taken individually, are in fact pieces of elementary information that describe some particular aspects of a phenomenon, but do not allow us to represent them. To get more knowledge about a phenomenon, a form of analysis is needed that can link the data to some significant aspect of the phenomenon itself. It is therefore necessary to follow a path to transform data into an element of knowledge.
The two important steps in this path...