BI integration
Discussion of efforts to integrate text analytics with business intelligence and other analytic technologies. Related subjects include:
KXEN is getting into text mining
Data mining challenger KXEN is getting into text mining, and they’re writing all their own stuff. Not even any Inxight filters. Weird. It will be interesting to see if they stick with that plan.
EDIT: Actually, upon reviewing an e-mail I see that their text mining features are in beta already. So I guess they stuck with the plan, at least for Release 1.
| Categories: BI integration, Text mining | Leave a Comment |
Why the BI vendors are integrating with Google OneBox
I’m hearing the same thing from multiple BI vendors, with SAS being the most recent and freshest in my mind — customers want them to “integrate” with Google OneBox. Why Google rather than a better enterprise search technology, such as FAST’s? So far as I’ve figured out, these are the reasons, in no particular order:
- Price.
- Ease of installation (real or imagined).
- The familiar Google brand name.
- The familiar Google UI.
- Google OneBox’s ability to search relational records, reports, etc. along with more tradtional record types.
The last point, I think, is the most interesting. Lots of people think text search is and/or should be the dominant UI of the future. Now, I’ve been a big fan of natural language command line interfaces ever since the days of Intellect and Lotus HAL. But judging by the market success of those products — or for that matter of voice command/control — I was in a very small minority. Maybe the even simpler search interface — words jumbled together without grammatical structure — will win out instead.
Who knows? Progress is a funny thing. Maybe the ultimate UI will be one that responds well to grunts, hand gestures, and stick-figure drawings. We could call it NeanderHAL, but that would wrong …
| Categories: BI integration, Enterprise search, FAST, Google, Natural language processing (NLP), SAS, Search engines | 1 Comment |
Is text technology mirroring business intelligence?
After even more glitches than usual with their content management system, Computerworld finally posted the second part of my series on enterprise text technology architectures. I already posted the main points of the column here several weeks ago, but of course the column includes further material. In particular, I draw an analogy between text technologies and business intelligence, inspired in part by various direct ties between the two disciplines. Dave Kellogg makes a similar point, focused on general market development.
Just how precisely accurate the analogy winds up being will depend in a large part, I think, on whether search engines (analogous to data warehouses) will wind up being the foundation of text-heavy functionality. The jury is still out on that.
| Categories: BI integration, Search engines | Leave a Comment |
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 |
Text mining into big data warehouses
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. 🙁
It’s just a couple of data points, but I feel a trend here.
| Categories: BI integration, Text mining | 3 Comments |
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.
Read more