IBM said today they are giving away search software concentrating on factual information and concepts over traditional keyword searches used by most of the main search engine entities out there.
The big search companies have done fairly basic searches with regard to searching internally, IBM want to take this to the next level. This will include text documents, web pages, problem reports, email and other unstructured content sources to garner more understanding from the context of the information.
IBM calls this technology “Unstructured Information Management Architecture” (UIMA) and the key component to this UIMA is WebSphere Information Integrator Omnifind Edition. UIMA sets up the framework to be used to add text analytics to any application and enables interoperability among different vendors’ analytics software and enterprise applications.
“Today’s announcement will usher in a shift in how companies can use their unstructured information for greater business intelligence,” said Nelson Mattos, IBM distinguished engineer and vice president strategy, WebSphere Information Integration Solutions. “By delivering higher quality search results enhanced by newly discovered concepts, relationships and facts, we can help enable solutions to find the exact information users are looking for, no matter where it may reside.”
According to the press release, 16 companies are in on this deal. Those companies include Attensity, ClearForest, Cognos, Endeca, Factiva, Kana, Inquira, iPhrase, Inxight, nStein, QL2, SAS, Schmalogic, Semagix, SPSS and Temis and they will all support UIMA as a standard framework for search and text analysis of unstructured information.
The big issue is what does this mean to those that take advantage of Big Blue’s open source tool. This means that users will be able to work through a lot of information that would’ve been near impossible to look for previously. This is obviously the key to Factiva’s new service to companies to monitor their presence on the web. This will allow for early product quality searches like in automobiles. IBM said this tool will look over warranty claims, maintenance records, repair requests and call center logs.
Another application could be intelligence gathering for various groups like Factiva will be doing but this could easily be applied to law enforcement and it doesn’t take long to figure out if that if certain government organizations monitoring the web for possible problem areas or just monitoring the Internet as a whole aren’t using some like this already, they certainly will be.
These are just a couple of possibilities. There will be tons of applications as IBM and the companies they’re working with in this project continue to develop tons of other applications for this new platform. For marketing research purposes, this tool is nothing short of brilliant.
John Stith is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
