Astronomy is undergoing a methodological revolution triggered by an unprecedented wealth of complex and accurate data. The new panchromatic, synoptic sky surveys require advanced tools for discovering patterns and trends hidden behind data which are both complex and of high dimensionality. We present DAMEWARE (DAta Mining & Exploration Web Application REsource): a general purpose, web-based, distributed data mining environment developed for the exploration of large data sets, and finely tuned for astronomical applications. By means of graphical user interfaces, it allows the user to perform classification, regression, or clustering tasks with machine learning methods. Salient features of DAMEWARE include its ability to work on large datasets with minimal human intervention, and to deal with a wide variety of real problems such as the classification of globular clusters in the galaxy NGC1399; the evaluation of photometric redshifts; and, finally, the identification of candidate Active Galactic Nuclei in multiband photometric surveys. In all these applications, DAMEWARE allowed us to achieve better results than those attained with more traditional methods. With the aim of providing potential users with all needed information, in this paper we briefly describe the technological background of DAMEWARE, give a short introduction to some relevant aspects of data mining, followed by a summary of some science cases and, finally, provide a detailed description of a template use case.