An Unified Definition of Data Mining
  Since many years, theoretical concepts of Data Mining have been developed and improved. Data Mining has become applied to many academic and industrial situations, and recently, soundings of public opinion about privacy have been carried out. However, a consistent and standardized definition is still missing, and the initial explanation given by Frawley et al. has pragmatically often changed over the years. Furthermore, alternative terms like Knowledge Discovery have been conjured and forged, and a necessity of a Data Warehouse has been endeavoured to persuade the users. In this work, we pick up current definitions and introduce an unified definition that covers existing attempted explanations. For this, we appeal to the natural original of chemical states of aggregation. 
Christoph Schommer