Dozy,
Yes, there are several FAA sponsored programs that datamine. At least one company has an automated program that uses the flight recorder data.
An event, such as a wake encounter, windshear, or clear air turbulence, can be culled from the aircraft systems response (the g-rate, roll, etc).
This shows the significance of the effect and shows the pilot reaction, if any, to the event.
This data mining was deliberately blind, so it automatically scrubbed the airline/flight number info. It was fairly extensive, something like 75K flight hours.
The results were very interesting below 10,000 feet.