US Patent 7010526 Knowledge-based data mining system

In a data mining system, data is gathered into a data store using, e.g., a Web crawler. The data is classified into entities. Data miners use rules to process the entities and append respective keys to the entities representing characteristics of the entities as derived from expert rules embodied in the miners. With these keys, characteristics of entities as defined by disparate expert authors of the data miners are identified for use in responding to complex data requests from customers.