| Will the cloud change BI forever? |
| Written by Paul Furber ITWeb Brainstorm, June 2010 edition, page 60 | |||
| Wednesday, 09 June 2010 13:36 | |||
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The world's production of unstructured data continues as rapidly as ever and mining it for useful information is big business. Most of the current concern about Facebook's ever-decreasing respect for its users is that all of the unstructured data in there can be mined for deeply personal information. But it's not just web giants that are overflowing with lack of structure. Kevin Kemp, commercial sales manager at SAS Institute, says it's true of his enterprise clients as well. "The biggest challenge is that 80 percent of all data in our customer base is unstructured," he says. "So that needs to be put into a structured format and standards need to be implemented so you can do something with it. There's a bunch of ways to do it but the challenge is getting bigger as the data exponentially multiplies." One way is to avoid the problem altogether. Charl du Toit, Oracle sales manager at EOH, says it's not always necessary to extract structure from the lack of it. "Sometimes you can just deliver documents through your business intelligence portal with context. That might be enough instead of spending two years generating yet more data." What's also happened is technologies to make sense of the web's proliferation of data are crossing over to the business intelligence (Bl) domain. "There's a growing crossover between search and Bl, between traditional access to information via Bl tools and search technologies," says Ryan Jamieson, MD of IS Partners. "They are feeding off each other. One of the things that I've seen emerge are tools that do meta-data analysis against unstructured information." Michael Jones, Bl solution manager at SAP, agrees. "There are two approaches," he says. "There's search, in which I have to know what I'm looking for initially, and then there's the question that says 'let's extract meaning from the data'. I could be looking for sentiment analysis, for example, which is one way of deriving meaning from text." In some industries the job is even harder. Barbara Luckemeyer, Bl consultant at KID, has worked with unstructured data in the medical field. "It's a very different approach to working with traditional financials," she says. "Medical and research organisations know that they're looking for trends but they can't predict what those are ahead of time. And each hospital and clinic will have certain assets but they'll be in a different format. To try to bring those together and make sense of them is a huge challenge. You sit with different professors and analysts and try to figure out what they mean. It does take a long time. Patient records, diagnostics, observations from CAT scans, all are very wordy and different people have different styles of writing, which is the challenge." Click on the links below to read the rest of the article
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