Abstract: An important problem in the area of data mining is the development of effective measures of interestingness for ranking discovered knowledge. The authors propose five principles that any measure must satisfy to be considered useful for ranking the interestingness of summaries generated from databases. We investigate the problem within the context of summarizing a single dataset which can be generalized in many different ways and to many levels of granularity. We perform a comparative sensitivity analysis of fifteen well-known diversity measures to identify those which satisfy the proposed principles. The fifteen diversity measures have previously been utilized in various disciplines, such as information theory, statistics, ecology, and economics. Their use as objective measures of interestingness for ranking summaries generated from databases is novel. The objective of this work is to gain some insight into the behaviour that can be expected from each of the diversity measures in practice, and to begin to develop a theory of interestingness against which the utility of new measures can be assessed.