Classical culture media, as well as domestic and/or industrial wastewater treated by biological processes, have a complex composition. The on-line and/or in situ determination of some substances is possible, but expensive, as sample collection and pre-treatment are often necessary with strict rules of sterility. More global methods can be used to detect rapidly "accidents" such as the appearance of an undesirable by-product in a fermentation broth or of a toxic substance in wastewater. These methods combine a "hard" part, for sensing, and a "soft" part, for data treatment. Among potential "hard" candidates, spectroscopy can be the basis for non-invasive and non-destructive measuring systems. Some of them have been already tested in situ: ultra-violet-visible, infra-red (mid or near), fluorescence (mono-dimensional, two-dimensional or synchronous), dielectric, while others, more sophisticated, such as mass spectrometry, coupled or not to pyrolysis, nuclear magnetic resonance and Raman spectroscopy, have been proposed. All these methods provide spectra, i.e. large sets of data, from which meaningful information should be rapidly extracted, either for analysis or fingerprinting. The recourse to data-mining techniques (the "soft" part) such as principal components analysis, projection on latent structures or artificial neural networks, is a necessary step for that task. A review of techniques, mostly based on spectroscopy, with examples taken in the bioengineering field in general is proposed.