Turning Unstructured Content into Actionable Business Intelligence 

For years it has been routine to visualize numeric data (structured data) using pie charts, colored graphs, multi dimensional analysis, Pareto charts, and so forth. It is visualization that brings out the reality and contrast in a large collection of numbers. However, this same capability has not been available with textual data. Textual data is found in many places and in many formats including emails, email attachments, PDF files, spread sheets, PowerPoint files, text files, document files, and many more file types.

Access to this unstructured data can be critically important for making business decisions. The problem is that business intelligence technology is best suited for the display of numeric data while unstructured data is largely made up of text. Visualization allows you to produce Self Organizing Maps (SOM’s) of unstructured data and documents. In one place you can view unstructured data and documents as you have never been able to previously. With a properly constructured SOM, you can look at:

• Large numbers (hundreds to millions) of unstructured documents that have been formed into a library.
• Documents and data at real time speed.
• The deepest level of accuracy that is possible.
• Individual unstructured documents and the relationships between documents.
• Views of data ranging from the larger picture to drill-down detail.
• Factors in your business that you are currently unaware of.

By compiling and presenting massive amounts of business data as intuitive visualizations which can be viewed over space and time, IDS Visualization facilitates critical new business insights and empowers managers to make faster, smarter and more profitable business decisions.

Uses for IDS Visualization

The innovations in IDS Visualization take advantage of the remarkable ability of the human brain and visual system to interpret pictures faster than words/data and discern patterns and relationships in massive, multi-variate datasets that would be otherwise invisible or unintelligible.

Here are just a few of the many industries that can benefit from an IDS Visualization solution and its ability to assimilate, organize and display textual data:

• in the oil and gas environment, where pipeline and other infrastructure is described out in the field in textual reports and is needed by researchers, scientists, engineers and core business.
• in the pharmaceutical clinical test trial environment, where doctors gather the results of thousands of clinical trials which they must assimilate and correlate the data into intelligent information.
• in the automobile manufacturing environment, where thousands of emails must be organized in order to know what part of the car is drawing consumer attention.
• in the aerospace manufacturing environment, where there is a need for gathering the text of manufacturing and engineering specifications for mammoth projects and using this data for real time decision making.
• in the consumer products environment, where you can quickly and easily detect and understand the multitude of important patterns and connections showing how your customers interact with your products.

IDS Visualization Features

Whatever the application, every Visualization solution includes these important features:

• Ability to handle large volumes of documents ranging from a few hundred to tens of millions.
• Processing speeds that allow you to retrieve and change what you are analyzing in seconds. Is this true?
• Fully integrated with the IDS Foundation engine for extracting, transforming and loading your documents and data.
• Accuracy that is much greater than human-processed analysis. The SOM goes down to the individual stemmed text level which is as accurate as textual processing can become.
• Automated processing of related documents or classes of documents.

For a more in-depth look at IDS Visualization, click here: