Here is a post from my Portals and KM blog that I want to share on this blog. Socrates said that, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” In perhaps a parody of this statement the Forrester report, Text Analytics Takes Business Insight To New Depths, states that “unexamined content is a wasted opportunity.” They look at an array of tools that go beyond simple search. This might be a good thing as a Google search on the term, the unexamined life is not worth living, turns up a number of term paper services in its top ten. The Forrester team of Leslie Owens with Matthew Brown, Sara Burnes, and Peter Schmidt conclude through the report subtitle that “An Obscure Technology Has Found Its Killer App.” I would certainly agree and appreciate receiving a review copy of this report.
The authors note that customers, employees, and competitors comment on products, personalities, and companies in increasingly public places, like Twitter and discussion forums. Forrester that online ratings and reviews topped the list of trusted material. The abundance of news and commentary on the Internet could contain actionable knowledge for your business. This is not simply a Web issue as internal sources like emails and call center notes are full of product suggestions, feedback on competitors, and thoughts on the market. With the rise of enterprise 2.0 and related social media data, the opportunities for data mining and information overload are expanding. To make sense of all this content, businesses are turning to text analytics tools.
The team concludes that this “little-known technology has a compelling value proposition: extract meaning out of large quantities of text by mining, interpreting, and structuring information to reveal hidden patterns and relationships.” I am not so sure about the little known part but I agree with the rest of the statement. Perhaps I am biased because I have been talking with a lot of vendors in this space. One of the great opportunities of both Web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 is all the conversational content that it creates. You would be losing a good bit of the value it you do not look at this content but you need good tools to do it.
The team found that here is too much content to review by hand, It is hard to separate a signal from noise, and here is no way to know what questions to ask. They add that when you don’t know what’s significant about a set of content, you can’t investigate it with a search engine. The report reviews a number of the major text analytic players and should be useful for those making decisions in this space. Text analytics software typically includes four key components: entity extraction, categorization, relationship mapping, and sentiment analysis.
The authors caution that “until recently, text analytics software was obscure and academic, used primarily by early adopters in the life sciences field… Text analytics is a framework and a process. It is not always necessary or possible to deploy text analytics as a single, linear solution from a single vendor.” It does seem that many of the solutions are complex and are designed to be used by professionals, often with subject matter expertise in linguistics and statistics. There is much more and you can obtain the report at the Forrerster web site.
As a post script to my comments on this useful report I want to say a bit about Darwin Ecosystem. The Darwin Awareness Engine™ offers a different approach to the same issue. Using chaos theory it uncovers the emerging themes about a topic, a form of categorization. However, it operates through a simple interface that is designed to be accessible by a wide range of people. The Scan Cloud™ visualization allows you to see immediately the relationships between content groupings in real time within your chosen theme and draw your own conclusions as to what trends are occurring. It is another way to get into content discovery. Putting The Darwin Awareness Engine in the hands of experts, will better equip these individuals to discover new trends in their field. However, ii is also accessible to the average business user so they can have a greater awareness of their areas of interest.