The world of text mining is simultaneously a minefield and a gold mine. It is an exciting application field and an area of scientific research that is currently under rapid development. It uses techniques from well-established scientific fields (e.g. data mining, machine learning, information retrieval, natural language processing, case­ based reasoning, statistics and knowledge management) in an effort to help people gain insight, understand and interpret large quantities of (usually) semi-structured and unstructured data. Despite the advances made during the last few years, many issues remain umesolved. Proper co-ordination activities, dissemination of current trends and standardisation of the procedures have been identified, as key needs. There