More on Attensity
I had a long and far-ranging talk today with Attensity. Key takeaways included:
- They want to be positioned in the BI space, e.g. as “ETL for text/unstructured data.” They place a lot of value on their partnership with Business Objects and Teradata. And, as a key part of the exhaustive extraction/FRN story, they think that BI/data warehouse information roll-up tools are an excellent (if imperfect) substitute for hardcore semantic extraction.
- Attensity 4 is coming out soon, and it’s going to feature extremely multimodal text analysis.
To expand on the second point:
Attensity 4 will feature linguistic extraction, exhaustive extraction , automatic clustering and keyword search. They also have machine-learning automated creation of linguistic extractors, but that may just be in their consulting operations. Or as they put it in their slides:
• Unified application for Text Analytics
• Workflow based: search, discover, analyze
• Alerts users when issues are found in text
• Includes auto-categorization of text
• Enables rapid extraction and extensive text exploration
….
• Point and click extraction process so that analysts and business users can run extractions on their own
…
• Users choose data sets for exploration (emphasis mine)
The point of all this, it seems, is to enable a whole variety of processes for text analysis.
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[…] I previously noted that Attensity seemed to putting a lot of emphasis on a partnership with Business Objects and Teradata, although due to vacations I’ve still failed to get anybody from Business Objects to give me their view of the relationship’s importance. Now Greenplum tells me that O’Reilly is using their system to support text mining (apparently via homegrown technology), although I wasn’t too clear on the details. I also got the sense Greenplum is doing more in text mining, but the details of that completely escaped me. […]
[…] I had a call with Business Objects, mainly about their overall EIM/ETL product line (Enterprise Information Management, a superset of Extract/Transform/Load). But I took the opportunity to ask about their deal with Attensity. (Attensity themselves posted more about the relationship, including some detailed links, here.) It actually sounds pretty real. They also mentioned that there seem to be a bunch of startups proposing search as a substitute for data warehousing, much as FAST sometimes likes to. […]
[…] Frankly, most enterprises that have a need for this technology should put both Attensity and Clearforest on their short lists. But he’s one technical note that may help predict who you’ll wind up actually selecting: Attensity’s lead strategy for integration is to dump everything into relational tables, for conventional analytics-stack products like Business Objects’ and Teradata’s to manipulate. Clearforest’s lead strategy for integration has more of an SOA/XML flavor, grown out of conventional OO. If one of those sounds like an obviously better fit to your situation than the other, then that’s the vendor you absolutely, positively should not leave out of your evaluation process. • • • […]