Informatics and hypothesis‐driven research

of data, but rather as providing significant ‘added value’. Consider a commercial database consisting of credit-card transactions: its purpose is to keep track of individual accounts, and most of the queries to the database are specific, focused and initiated individually. In contrast, automated data-mining techniques permit the same database to be characterised in terms of significant large-scale correlations that provide a rich array of market research data. More importantly, one can search on an ongoing basis for anomalous patterns of activity that raise the possibility of fraud; in fact, a commercial database that does not carry out such automated ‘data-driven discovery’ might even be considered negligent. I suggest that research databases that are populated and analysed according to specific