Attensity
Analysis of text mining vendor Attensity and its products. Related subjects include:
Text mining and search, joined at the hip
Most people in the text analytics market realize that text mining and search are somewhat related. But I don’t think they often stop to contemplate just how close the relationship is, could be, or someday probably will become. Here’s part of what I mean:
- Text mining powers search. The biggest text mining outfits in the world, possibly excepting the US intelligence community, are surely Google, Yahoo, and perhaps Microsoft.
- Search powers text mining. Restricting the corpus of documents to mine, even via a keyword search, makes tons of sense. That’s one of the good ideas in Attensity 4.
- Text mining and search are powered by the same underlying technologies. For starters, there’s all the tokenization, extraction, etc. that vendors in both areas license from Inxight and its competitors. Beyond that, I think there’s a future play in integrated taxonomy management that will rearrange the text analytics market landscape.
| Categories: Attensity, Business Objects and Inxight, Enterprise search, FAST, Google, IBM and UIMA, Ontologies, Open source text analytics, Search engines, Text mining | 3 Comments |
Business Objects’ perspective on text mining (and search)
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.
| Categories: Attensity, BI integration, Search engines, Text mining | 1 Comment |
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.
| Categories: Attensity, Text mining | 3 Comments |
Pioneers moving on
Ramana Rao is leaving Inxight, or has by now. Today I also discovered that Todd Wakefield is leaving Attensity. Such things happen in all industries, of course.
| Categories: Attensity, Business Objects and Inxight, Text mining | Leave a Comment |
Attensity, extractive exhaustion, and the FRN
Two of the clearest and most charismatic speakers in the text mining business are Attensity cofounders Todd Wakefield and David Bean. Last year, Todd’s Text Mining Summit speech gave an excellent overview of the various application areas in which text mining was being adopted; vestiges of that material may be found in a blog post I made at the time, and on Attensity’s web site. This time, David’s Text Analytics Summit speech was basically a pitch for Attensity’s latest product release – and it was a pitch well worth hearing.
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