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It can be argued that conventional data mining tools can be usefully applied to mine GIS databases to extract pattern in the same way that conventional statistical methods can be applied to spatial data. There are some geoinformational data mining tasks that may be usefully performed by conventional data mining software. Table 7.1 outlines the range of tools that most data mining packages offer and many of these methods could be usefully applied to spatial data. For example, data reduction tools, such as multivariate classification, can be useful as a means of summarising the essential features of large spatial data sets; for instance, to create geodemographic classifications. Similarly, modelling tools such as neural networks and decision trees can be readily applied to some geographic problems. It can be argued that whilst these methods ignore all of the special features of geographical data (see table 7.2), they …