Proper analysis of a problem requires the ability to acquire a holistic view of all supporting data. Supporting data may be external unstructured data from a news feed or social media, or it could come from internal structured databases. Infinit.e allows for the fusion of disparate data sources into a unified semi-structured format.

The business challenge

• Structured vs. Unstructured: Visualizing structured data has been relatively easy for most organizations; bar graphs and scatter plots emerge from structured data without much work. However, an increasingly large percentage of the data that would enhance these structured graphs is unstructured: news articles, e-mails, blogs, review websites, RSS feeds, documents or reports, research papers, and more. By unifying these different types of data into a common semi-structured format, these verticals of data can be flattened and analyzed together.

• Data stove-pipes: A problem facing many organizations today is the continued accrual of new databases with different data structures. Legacy servers may contain valuable information, but store the data in an outdated or different data structure from other related systems. The expense involved with migrating databases can often be prohibitive, and deny decision makers the ability to view related data in a meaningful or common way.

• Social Media: A wealth of information can be found in social media, however the data does not natively lend itself to side-by-side analysis with traditional data. Enabling a user to analyze blog posts or social network connections in conjunction with news articles or internal structured data can illuminate trends or correlations that might not have been apparent through in-depth research of those sources individually.

Industry scenarios

• Stove-Piped Databases: The DoD intelligence community is a good example of a group of organizations with continuously changing data storage architectures, but the problem is shared by any organization that has had time to accumulate data. New data warehouses are commonly incompatible with their legacy counterparts. Intelligence reports can be stored in any number of formats or locations, and being able to bridge the numerous data stove-pipes without having to completely replace or reinvent them is a cost-effective and desired approach.

• Law Enforcement: Local crime bloggers and community action groups contribute a wealth of information about criminal activity and even police response times for the small areas they represent. Combined with traditional police reports and crime data, law enforcement can ensure resources are properly allocated in certain areas under their jurisdiction. Potential leads and witnesses can be further identified from the social media clustered around an incident.

• Brand Management: Organizations attempt to track the sentiment of users and use this to adapt marketing or future product features accordingly. This requires the analysis of large volumes of real time data from different sources to work effectively. Without being able to look at the various sources at the same time, meaningful trends in the user or customer sentiment cannot be realized.

IKANOW can help

• Unified data format: Ikanow’s unified, semi-structured data format allows organizations to harvest a wide variety of disparate data sources and seamlessly merge them into a homogenous format that allows connections to be made between entities regardless of where they were extracted from.

• Enterprise trends analysis: If an organization has different divisions or branches that use different file systems (potentially resulting from mergers, acquisitions, or isolated development), Infinit.e enables the analysis of enterprise-wide trends or themes in the data.

• Visualization: Ikanow uses a RESTful interface that enables plug-and-play with the visualizations many organizations are already comfortable with, as well as lending itself to relatively easy development of custom visualizations for a wide variety of views into whatever data source an organization wishes to analyze.