Abstract: The invention provides a method and system for performing data mining autonomously with regard to a set of data, and formulating hypotheses in response thereto. An autonomous software element (a) collects sets of data, along with collateral data, into a unified extensible database; (b) formulates possibly interesting hypotheses with regard to those data; (c) evaluates hypotheses, thus relating each hypothesis against a probability it could have occurred by chance; (d) rates each hypothesis in response to multiple factors; (e) reports those hypotheses to users, selecting those users who are most likely to be interested and who are most interested in being informed.