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IBM launches information discovery system
New Delhi, Sept 23: US technology giant IBM has launched an advanced information discovery system that will help extract trends, relationships and patterns from both structured and unstructured data from among billions of web pages.
New Delhi, Sept 23: US technology giant IBM has launched an advanced information discovery system that will help extract trends, relationships and patterns from both structured and unstructured data from among billions of web pages.
The new platform, dubbed WebFountain, using sophisticated analytical tools will comb through billions of documents from the Web, news sources and a company's own information stockpiles to uncover valuable business insight, says an IBM official.
The platform could allow companies such as advertising agencies and content providers to search huge quantities of text, and come up with the precise data they are looking for, saving critical time and manpower.
"Search engines are sadly lacking in insight and judgment. Getting beyond those limitations is the impetus for the new IBM technology," he says. While a regular search just does key word matching, WebFountain will be able to put context into the text (on the Internet) and customise it for a corporation or a user, according to the official.
The primary focus will be on identifying patterns, trends and relationships in unstructured text data stores such as news feeds, a full crawl of the Worldwide Web, industry-specific data sources and company documents.
These trends, relationships and patterns can uncover markets, technologies, opportunities, and business risks, claims the IBM official.
IBM says the platform, the result of four years work at its Almaden research base in California, is able intelligently to use a massive data index that it builds up. The system, run by a supercomputer that absorbs 25 million Web pages a day from the Internet, learns to recognise and put into context particular phrases and groups of words on command. However, there was no information as to how much the system would cost to develop.
Information coming into the system is stored in the data-mining layer, where information miners work on the data to identify and filter out spam and duplicates, tokenise the data to identify people and companies, and discover patterns, trends and relationships in the data.
Albeit business decisions have become significantly more complex during the past decade, managers are still using newspapers, trade journals, Web-page research, and the occasional professional reports to keep track of their business environment. WebFountain is a powerful data-mining program that enables marketers to use the Web as a surrogate for public opinion, the IBM official says.
Pointing out that the new technology could be a revenue earner, IBm says text analytics has the potential to become a differentiator that could drive overall revenue growth in the company's large-enterprise customer base.
The platform could allow companies such as advertising agencies and content providers to search huge quantities of text, and come up with the precise data they are looking for, saving critical time and manpower.
"Search engines are sadly lacking in insight and judgment. Getting beyond those limitations is the impetus for the new IBM technology," he says. While a regular search just does key word matching, WebFountain will be able to put context into the text (on the Internet) and customise it for a corporation or a user, according to the official.
The primary focus will be on identifying patterns, trends and relationships in unstructured text data stores such as news feeds, a full crawl of the Worldwide Web, industry-specific data sources and company documents.
These trends, relationships and patterns can uncover markets, technologies, opportunities, and business risks, claims the IBM official.
IBM says the platform, the result of four years work at its Almaden research base in California, is able intelligently to use a massive data index that it builds up. The system, run by a supercomputer that absorbs 25 million Web pages a day from the Internet, learns to recognise and put into context particular phrases and groups of words on command. However, there was no information as to how much the system would cost to develop.
Information coming into the system is stored in the data-mining layer, where information miners work on the data to identify and filter out spam and duplicates, tokenise the data to identify people and companies, and discover patterns, trends and relationships in the data.
Albeit business decisions have become significantly more complex during the past decade, managers are still using newspapers, trade journals, Web-page research, and the occasional professional reports to keep track of their business environment. WebFountain is a powerful data-mining program that enables marketers to use the Web as a surrogate for public opinion, the IBM official says.
Pointing out that the new technology could be a revenue earner, IBm says text analytics has the potential to become a differentiator that could drive overall revenue growth in the company's large-enterprise customer base.