Knowledge Discovery in Literature Data Bases

. The concept of knowledge discovery as defined through "establishing previously unknown and unsuspected relations of features in a data base" is, cum grano salis, relatively easy to implement for a data bases containing numerical data. Increasingly we find at our disposal data bases containing scientific literature. Computer assisted detection of unknown relations of features in such data bases would be extremely valuable and would lead to new scientific insights. However, the current representation of scientific knowledge in such data bases is not conducive to computer processing. Any correlation of features still has to be done by the human reader, a process which is plagued by ineffectiveness and incompleteness. On the other hand we note that considerable progress is being made in an area where reading all available material is totally prohibitive: the World Wide Web. Robots and web crawlers mine the Web continuously and construct data bases which allow the identification of pages ..