Over 60 researchers from 10 countries took part in the Third Knowledge
Discovery in Databases (KDD) Workshop, held during the Eleventh Natio
nal Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Washington, D.C. A major
trend evident at the workshop was the transition to applications in th
e core KDD area of discovery of relatively simple patterns in relation
al databases; the most successful applications are appearing in the ar
eas of greatest need, where the databases are so large that manual ana
lysis is impossible. Progress has been facilitated by the availability
of commercial KDD tools for both generic discovery and domain-specifi
c applications such as marketing. At the same time, progress has been
slowed by problems such as lack of statistical rigor, overabundance of
patterns, and poor integration. Besides applications, the main themes
of this workshop were (1) the discovery of dependencies and models an
d (2) integrated and interactive KDD systems.