Text Analytics, and real-time Big Data

The Text Analytics Summit in London this week was an opportunity to catch up on the latest trends and state of the Text Analytics market.  An interesting couple of days with a few themes emerging.

Firstly, Big Data.  Not entirely unexpected, but almost every presentation referred to Big Data in some shape or form.  In part this was referring to the volume of data to be processed, but primarily in the context of databases for the storage and processing of unstructured data of any volume.

Although not discussed explicitly, there’s obviously a search for business models that work.  Most applications were B2B platforms, sold as a package of product, services and consultancy, enabling organizations to better mine text data for market and competitor intelligence.  However, some were seeking to monetize through subscriptions to information feeds.

 

For SQLstream, we presented on the use of real-time text analytics for improving incident detection and prediction.  In particular, the use of real-time Twitter and text messages for identifying Quality of Experience issues with IP content services, but also the use of Twitter for improving real-time incident detection in transportation networks.  And in line with the rest of the conference, we did our bit for Big Data, describing how real-time streaming integration and analytics can be built on unstructured data analytics as an integrated real-time Big Data and Hadoop platform.