This document discusses data mining and provides several examples of its applications: 1) Data mining can be used to build customer profiles, analyze credit ratings, detect fraud and intrusions, and make recommendations on websites. 2) Environmental data mining can discover rules in geo-spatial data, analyze weather impacts, and find patterns in Earth science variables. 3) Common data mining techniques include classification, clustering, and association rule mining, which are used to organize data, group similar items, and discover relationships.