Abstract

Our society is currently entering a new phase in which gigabytes of information are becoming readily available for exploration over academic networks, digital libraries, and commercial information services as well as in proprietary commercial and governmental databases. This important technological development presents a substantial challenge, as future intelligent systems must be able to store very large streams of data, summarize and index this data using concise and efficient models, and subsequently perform very efficient retrieval and reasoning in response to real-time queries and updates. We informally refer to this challenging task as reasoning from data.