Modern knowledge discovery methods enable users to discover complex patterns of various types in large information repositories. However, the underlying assumption has always been that the data to which the methods are applied to originates from one domain. The focus of this book, and the BISON project from which the contributions are originating, is a network based integration of various types of data repositories and the development of new ways to analyse and explore the resulting gigantic information networks. Instead of finding well defined global or local patterns they wanted to find domain bridging associations which are, by definition, not well defined since they will be especially interesting if they are sparse and have not been encountered before. The 32 contributions presented in this state-of-the-art volume together with a detailed introduction to the book are organized in topical sections on bisociation; representation and network creation; network analysis; exploration; and applications and evaluation.
