  Modern scientific data mainly consist of huge datasets gathered by a very
large number of techniques and stored in very diversified and often
incompatible data repositories. More in general, in the e-science environment,
it is considered as a critical and urgent requirement to integrate services
across distributed, heterogeneous, dynamic "virtual organizations" formed by
different resources within a single enterprise. In the last decade, Astronomy
has become an immensely data rich field due to the evolution of detectors
(plates to digital to mosaics), telescopes and space instruments. The Virtual
Observatory approach consists into the federation under common standards of all
astronomical archives available worldwide, as well as data analysis, data
mining and data exploration applications. The main drive behind such effort
being that once the infrastructure will be completed, it will allow a new type
of multi-wavelength, multi-epoch science which can only be barely imagined.
Data Mining, or Knowledge Discovery in Databases, while being the main
methodology to extract the scientific information contained in such MDS
(Massive Data Sets), poses crucial problems since it has to orchestrate complex
problems posed by transparent access to different computing environments,
scalability of algorithms, reusability of resources, etc. In the present paper
we summarize the present status of the MDS in the Virtual Observatory and what
is currently done and planned to bring advanced Data Mining methodologies in
the case of the DAME (DAta Mining & Exploration) project.
