Big Data: Providing Speed to Insight
Jinfo Blog

By Dr Phil Hastings

Abstract

The true value of big data is the ability to analyse large datasets and in a competitive business environment the time required to reach this analysis is critical. During a recent interview with Dr Phil Hastings, SVP of Marketing for Linguamatics, we came away with some practical examples of how text mining can be used to achieve "speed to insight".

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Linguamatics provides text mining software and services to life sciences companies and healthcare providers. Dr Hastings observed, “What’s really interesting for a start is the fact that we can derive structure from unstructured data. Customers can use what’s already out there along with our results. This can lead to predictive models used to better inform their decisions.

"One of the things the software does is that rather than extracting text strings it can leverage ontologies, thesauri, and the grammatical structure of the text to give semantic meaning to results. The customers can use the structured data we have helped them get and go to other datasets that they may have created in an RDF triple format or similar. The combined set will be structured to their needs. This represents a nice cross over between two areas of data management."

The full interview with Phil covers a range of topics relevant to the concept of creating structured data from vast amounts of unstructured big data. In addition, we delve into some discussion about the role of information professionals in this new world and the blurring of the roles associated with information scientists and informaticians.

As Dr Hastings observes, “Thanks to text mining, the typical questions asked of information professionals, and the answers they can provide, have become a great deal more sophisticated."

FreePint Subscribers can log in to view the full article: Big Data: Speed to Insight, an Interview with Linguamatics.

Editor's Note: Big Data in Action

This article is part of the FreePint Topic Series: Big Data in Action, which includes articles, reports, webinars and resources published between April and June 2013. Learn more about the series here.

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